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The John Tusa Interviews |
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Transcript of the John Tusa Interview with the painter Luc Tuymans JOHN TUSA: It's easy to say who Luc Tuymans is. He's a Belgian. He's forty-six years old and he's a painter, some say one who is recreating the very business of painting in the twenty-first century. He was the star of the Venice Biennale three years ago, and almost any review of contemporary painting would include his work. It's easy to describe what his paintings look like. In a word they're very pale, really pale, as if sun bleached or age worn. As if the artist is deliberately denying himself the sensuous delights of paint and colour, the outlines, the images have a sketchy, almost casual look, deceptively simple, even innocent in their presentation of a face, a limb, a street, a room, a city or a random collection of objects. This is where the problems start. What are they about? They're not simple. They are not innocent. They are not random. Indeed those apparent characteristics allow the paintings to carry huge weights of leaning, often about history, the Holocaust, Belgium's horrific colonial past, local nationalism. Some of his works are deeply personal, interpreting intense emotional states such as embitterment. All of them need careful examination, all of them need a knowledge of their title, or even a subtext of the subject matter, for image, title, text all work together to achieve their effect and even then they need decoding. Looking at Tuymans's work is not a casual business. The artist himself doesn't offer clues lightly, it is all he offers about the notion of indifference, yet no word is less suitable to describe the response his works invite, and he falls into no easy categories. Conceptualist, no. Post modernist, no. Colourist, hardly. Minimalist, no way. Abstract, definitely not. What does that leave? Just the way Tuymans paints. So what kind of painter are you? LUC TUYMANS: Well, I once was approached by John Baldessari years ago and it was also during another biennual in which he pointed out to me that I did something very specific for a painting, to which I alluded to him that I wouldn't know what that would be. In effect the way I paint could be seen as very traditional in a sense, but what probably is a difference is of course that it's painted now. As towards the element of the bleached or the blurred image, I think by close examination you will see that there is a lot of inhabitants of colours in order to come to this situation. Then on a traditional level of course where I come from, the region I come from, painting has a huge tradition and that tradition deals mostly with the idea of depth, and depth deals mostly with the idea of tones and not with full colours, and then there's also the idea of memorising an image, and every way you can memorise an image your memory itself already is completely inadequate, so in that sense that already unravels one of the things, but most of is I think is borne out of a genuine distrust of imagery, distrust in terms of not only comprehending it but also making it. And that probably is new, I mean that could be seen as contemporary, because I work of course with the figurative image, I could be easily seen as a person who works with the representation of representations that already exist, but on the other hand through the mimicry of that there is also the element of reconstructing that imagery, and that is something else, and in terms of history it's not just history painting, it's the realising of history which is an important difference. JOHN TUSA: So the question of belonging to a school, which you clearly don't, or having any label stuck on to you, this is completely irrelevant? LUC TUYMANS: Well for me it should be, I mean in terms that traditionally there, there would be links that I come up with, things that I admire, things that have a place and hold an influence throughout the work like somebody like Leon Spilliaert who was a sort of minor artist next to James Ensor of the same time period, but who through his reductive-ness already was, had a huge impact on my, on my work or the way of looking at things. JOHN TUSA: What kind of painter were you at art school? LUC TUYMANS: I was an extremely colourful, gestural virtuoso painter, so the exact opposite. JOHN TUSA: So why did you give up that early, I think somebody called it a virtuosic style? LUC TUYMANS: Because, well first of all I also had some problems with painting in terms that it became very existential, it became too close to my own person so to speak, and I also at a certain given moment stopped for five years and by accident started to work with film. JOHN TUSA: Accident? LUC TUYMANS: Yes because somebody by accident shoved a super eight camera into my hands and from there one thing led to another and eventually it ended up with working with twenty-five millimetre. JOHN TUSA: But you could have done that without giving up painting? LUC TUYMANS: I gave up painting for five years because the intensity of combining both is too intense, because the similarity is too high, because both are about the approachment of an image. As a good photographer you should be in the moment, you should not miss the moment, and as a painter you actually do nothing else than that except that it's of course virtually very precise and also time, it's a different sense of timing and a different sense of precision, and that sense has everything to do with the approach. JOHN TUSA: So why did you spend your time making film, what satisfaction did you get from working with film? LUC TUYMANS: It gave me at least a supplementary distance in order to yet again approach the imagery, and when I then finally came back to painting it gave me a different concept about the imagery. JOHN TUSA: Just staying with the filmmaking for a moment I think you said that apart from shooting a great deal, you cut and you cut, you edited and you edited and that that was where you learned. What did you learn from that process of constantly attacking the images you'd got on film? LUC TUYMANS: What I learn from anything is actually the violence of the cut and I mean physically cut, and on the other hand you also create an image that is not there, the imagery that you can't see, although every film of course is naturally driven in its narrative, but you can alter that narrative, so it learnt me a different way to assess time and the imagery going alongside of it. JOHN TUSA: And were you aware that what you were learning from working with film was something that would be useful when you returned to painting? LUC TUYMANS: Not at the time when I was filming because I was obsessively into that, as I am also obsessively into painting, but out of first of all two different things. There was one thing that, there was an edgy feeling lurching to go back to painting, to the material of painting and the physicality of it, and on the other hand there was also money problem with practicality with making film, and so I started to paint again. JOHN TUSA: And that course you started with your non flashy, non colourist, non gestural work, do you... LUC TUYMANS: Well there, there are all the works from 1978 I'd already also were re..., reductive, but what you will see at those older works is that they are built up in a different way. They are more built up in a sort of cognitive, intuitive way than the others depth. After the film experience the thing becomes a bit more pragmatic in a sense that I would start from toning the background, I would from then on start to make a painting in a day, only working wet and wet, having a clear decisive idea and a clear decisive design for every image that I would make. JOHN TUSA: On that sense of having a decisive idea that definitely came from the experience of film? LUC TUYMANS: No it, it existed before but not in such a clear way, in such a sort of specific way, and of course film makes you think not about only editing but also cropping an image and choosing an angle, and I think it also helped assessing a different form of frontality within the work. JOHN TUSA: What do you mean? LUC TUYMANS: Well the other works were very frontal as many others were afterwards too, but it's a different sense of frontality because there is like a inbuilt distance towards that type of frontality so that the stickiness and the existentialism actually are driven out of the imagery. JOHN TUSA: I want to come back to how you work a bit later, but I think it's important to talk about your subject matter. You're more overtly political than almost any other artist I can think of but you're not a propagandist. Was yours a political home, was there a lot of political discussion, was this was why you had this political sense? LUC TUYMANS: Well especially when it comes back to the, the other thing well of course there was a lot of talk, especially during the meals about that period of time, which of course was for a kid extremely traumatising in a sense because it's as far as I, as I, as I can remember which is like four or five years old, these conversations cropped up. There was a discrepancy between the two families, and that was in turn my mother is Dutch and my father is Flemish or from the Flemish side. Although both my mother and my father were far too young during the War, but the two families had a completely different history with the Second World War. JOHN TUSA: Did they argue about it? LUC TUYMANS: Well they had not only argues about it, they had fights about it, because the one family, the Dutch family was in the Resistance, and the other family, and this is of course also a cultural thing and that goes back to the First World War, had of course collaborated with the Germans, and this thing actually exploded or came to a peak when I was five years old by the turn up of photographs that made that history clear. JOHN TUSA: What were the photographs? LUC TUYMANS: The photographs were about, like you had the Hitlerjugend you also had the Flemish Nationalist Movements which were the new order movements and things like that, but of course that tied up close boundaries with the German occupation. And so by this cropping up of this material just by accident the whole thing virtually exploded, so that's already a visual, that is there, so that's very empowering for a kid. And in that sense the thing became a virtual obsession, and on the other hand of course the Second World War lost Europe all its colonies and all its power and reshuffled the card deck in terms of power, and secondly through the Holocaust there was a sort of, especially in central Europe, humongous psychological breakdown, and this has been the trauma 'til we speak now, I mean. JOHN TUSA: How did you come to be aware of it though as a young boy, because presumably your parents weren't discussing that particular issue, I can see they were discussing the local issues but not necessarily the, the, the Holocaust, so why did this feature so large in your imagination and understanding. LUC TUYMANS: No no no it was discussed, it was discussed in, in terms that it was referred to of course, and then of course even as a kid you could see it on television, so you were confronted with it in the very early stages too. JOHN TUSA: When you paint about the Holocaust, and we'll discuss one or two paintings in more detail, are you both refreshing the memory, because we tend to forget, or are you just acknowledging that the memory fades whatever we do? LUC TUYMANS: Actually both, but moreover I try to, or tend to, in a less moralistic way try to assess its position in something that is small and actually precise. As you can see like there is not really a sort of assessment or imagery that shows the atrocities in terms of heaps of bodies, of dead people. It shows moreover the leftovers or the empty spaces or emptied out space, but the same time they also these space refer to a certain type of reality that existed and which are documented. And my idea was in, and this is in discrepancy with the Germans in terms that they pretend the horror to be too big and therefore the impossibility to incorporate it into a culture, I actually incorporate it into a culture because you cannot deny it a cultural substance, because what's fascinating about this junction between the Italian Fascism and the German Fascism is that the German Fascism was clearly based upon cultural values, and that of course makes it all the more interesting. JOHN TUSA: Yeah the question of, of emptiness, there's one painting, it's a triptych actually called Recherche or Investigations, black and white, one shows an office, one shows an eye and one a medical clinic seen through one of those glass vatrines, and there they are the I suppose the organisations, the physical spaces within which atrocities took place. LUC TUYMANS: Yeah because it also has to do with the idea of the trivial and the banal within the idea of violence. I mean like Hannah Arendt also made this illusion towards Eichmann that he was so clearly normal and everyday like in a sense, and the triptych you are referring to is Recherche, the first image shows, or is based upon the image that I saw in Buchenwald which is the lampshade made out of human skin. The second is actually not referred to that directly it's just a photograph of the sick too, and the last one which has a sort of slight degrade going from orange to green is the vatrine in Auschwitz where you can see that out of human hair they have made cloth. I remember that image as a sort of canni..., cannibalistic image and therefore like a photocopied image, clearly graphic, and superimposed upon a backdrop that's sort of like denies his own death but at the same time also goes over it through the slight discoloration that imposed the idea of decay. JOHN TUSA: You're trying to also make us accept the fact that you don't need elaborate symbols of death and disaster. Extermination is organised in offices, it's as, that's one of the things you're trying to make us accept is it? LUC TUYMANS: When I did my first show in the States the curator at a certain given moment when I was installing my show said you Europeans do not understand the splash in the face, to which I actually responded in terms like whenever violence crops up where I come from it doesn't necessarily have a face, it's an organisation that kills by the millions, so that is a different assessment of the good, the bad or the ugly. JOHN TUSA: Is the deliberate, the apparent weakness of your style, the studied indifference as you say, is that directly related to the question of the way that memory fades even of the most horrid things, is that where your style and the subject matter inter react? LUC TUYMANS: It's actually the idea of being incapacitated to first of all as you said correctly also and I said before this sort of, you can elaborate on it of course and you can fictitiously enlarge it, but basically the idea of memory is being incapacitated. On the other hand there is also the element of abstraction that crops into it in the long run, because in the long run of course when iconography and its meaning fade away you are left with a very maybe similar or unsimilar visual, but just a visual, and this is the other situation, the fascination that true reality and its perception and even his repetition within perception you could come to a different perception, and that's where the idea of reconstruction of which I talked before comes into play. JOHN TUSA: I want you, you to say something about your use of photographic images 'cos I think particularly in the Belgian Congo series, though not only that, a lot of the pieces are identical to news photo images, so what is the process between the news photo and your turning it into a painting? LUC TUYMANS: Well the thing you are alluding to is probably the most journalistic body of work that I've made, which it had to be to a point, about the Belgian Congo, but then nevertheless there is, there is a lot of figuration that goes into one the picking of the imagery and also the way it is depicted. For example I would never, I've never actually projected an image onto a canvas, it's drawn, so it is already apprehended physically, therefore faulty in a sense that it differs from the more objective. JOHN TUSA: Can I just get this straight, are you painting side by side even, do you have the photographic image by the side or are you working on it? LUC TUYMANS: I have it, I have it, I have it in my hand and what I do is actually the process is that I will choose the lightest colour when I directly paint from a photograph, which is not always the case, then I would paint that first and then I would make the drawing with pencil into the wet paint, but directly from what I see on the reproduction, but as I say never projected, so that already distorts, it also makes the size of how big something is evident, and there are mistakes which I need because things should not be perfect. So that's already a physical difference in translating the imagery directly, and also I think even when I use a photograph this photograph is altered in different stages, it is re-photographed often. JOHN TUSA: You will re-photograph it? LUC TUYMANS: I will re-photograph it, yeah I will take photocopies of it, re-photograph it again or even translate it into a watercolour or whatever. JOHN TUSA: And what are you doing in the course of that process, what are you seeking to do to the image? LUC TUYMANS: I try to one analyse the image until its entirely dead, and I know every inch of it, and then also bring it to a point where it sort of in my terms ends, and that ending will be recreated in paint, because the actual deed of painting is so decisive to me, also so nervous, that my concentration span is very small which means a day, but that day is er extremely intense and that timing and that precision are also extremely intense. JOHN TUSA: You see when I first heard that you paint your paintings in, in a day I thought this is the sort of trick which a artist sets himself at some stage and says I will only paint it today because there is an existential value in doing it, but it's much more serious than that isn't it? LUC TUYMANS: No it is just a habit. I mean painting in accordance to me is not something extraordinary, it's a habit. It's like anybody else has a habit, except that the habit is extremely precise, but because you make a trace it's, it's something that of course to a certain extent is not completely, completely graspable and also is not completely, completely controllable, because there is a part that is still uncontrollable, and that is the interesting element. JOHN TUSA: What happens if you don't finish in the day, and I know you can sometimes work fifteen or sixteen hours? LUC TUYMANS: Well let's say that sometimes I come back at the painting I surely do, but it is really very small details, I mean but when the painting does not appear during the day it will never appear. JOHN TUSA: And what do you do then? LUC TUYMANS: Then I just throw it away, restart or wait. I have made paintings like Man Drinking that I had to paint the image six times in order to get it straight. JOHN TUSA: How did you know that it wasn't right? LUC TUYMANS: There's something you feel, it's something you can, you have a doubt, you have a, not only a physical doubt because you have different types of intelligence. You have of course your own so called intelligence, you can be intelligent with your hands also, and you can virtually feel when it doesn't really work, and then of course that visually translates because you have that knowledge because you have made it and you can't fool yourself. JOHN TUSA: Can you describe what the feeling is when you look at it and you know that it isn't right? LUC TUYMANS: You feel all the flaws, you see all the mismatched arbitrary, too many, you see the sort of ballast, you know this is too, too much on the painting. It doesn't have the freshness, the strength and the precision, and you can easily see that. JOHN TUSA: And then you chuck it away? LUC TUYMANS: When it comes to a stage where it is unsolvable yeah I will, I will throw it away. JOHN TUSA: Does that worry you, do you hate doing that or is it a relief? LUC TUYMANS: It is worse in a sense that you have also spent your time and your concentration onto something that hadn't worked, but on the other hand it also makes you a bit more humble so that's good. JOHN TUSA: Before you start painting and on the day that you know you're going to paint, how do you feel? LUC TUYMANS: Nervous still as always, because there is always the feeling of fear that goes alongside of it, there's never tranquillity, I mean before starting a painting. JOHN TUSA: And during the painting? LUC TUYMANS: The first steps are although automatic they may seem when you see me do them they are of a high intensity and it goes on and it goes on, but once I'm into the process and it starts to work and the image starts to appear then also it becomes a joy. JOHN TUSA: If somebody could see you painting, if you allowed anybody in just to observe, what would they see you doing physically? LUC TUYMANS: Well in fact it has been recorded on film, I mean I made murals and things like that that have been sort of recorded on film. What do they see? Probably, probably see something that is extremely detached from what they're looking at, I mean something fairly incomprehensible, because it is basically a very big move and then it goes into very small moves immediately, which are virtually invisible, and then all of a sudden there is the apparition of the image. JOHN TUSA: And how do you feel when you've finished? LUC TUYMANS: When I've really finished and the, the thing has worked out I'm first of all ecstatic, happy, which takes about at the most a minute, then I have to say though I mean when you're younger and probably also more innocent and you have less skills, or your skills are not on the point where they become in the far end, then the satisfaction is a little bit bigger. JOHN TUSA: As a person, and you've said that you have an aggressive nature, what does this mean for you as an artist and where does this aggression show itself? LUC TUYMANS: Well the aggression shows itself in not really showing itself. I mean not really allowing itself to be shown. It's, it's, it's not an inhibition. It's the aggression is clearly into the trace, the paint, into the nervousness of what's happening there, into the speed of which things are made but not shown, because even the blurredness, even the un-sharpness, even the toning down of the colours with other colours is shown, you can read it, so that's a more aggressive stance towards how you make your mark, or let's say maybe more animalistic in a sense. JOHN TUSA: And you've been described as a person, or perhaps as a painter too, as being melancholic and claustrophobic. I don't know whether those are your words, are they true? LUC TUYMANS: Supposedly everybody should be, or could be melancholic just by contemplating imagery you already get it, so sure to a point probably. Then the other thing of the claustrophobic, there is an element that the work resides inside, it doesn't really deal that much with the wide open space, it sort of like retrieves itself to the smallness of things, but from out that smallness tries to reach out to a different type of content, but that again is the expressing of the banal and actually from without the things that could be seen as very bourgeois there is a sort of element that is virtually mistaken for what you're actually looking at. JOHN TUSA: Yes I've always thought that phrase could go both ways, that is that banal things can be evil but that also evil is in the end banal, it is not something grand. I suppose that's the point of the phrase that it does work both ways. LUC TUYMANS: Yeah, but what is very important is that I am not clearly dealing with the spirituality of things, because that's not a way to be spiritual. It's something I learnt from Jan Van Eyck, of which actually there is a most beautiful painting is in the National Gallery which is the Arnolfinis. If you look at the painting of Van Eyck you will see such a stern realism that is so unforgiving and so unspiritual but within the framework of religion, because those days even signs was in the framework of religion. After those days, in the days of Reformation where you had Bruegel and other people the dilettante is actually born, of which I am dilettante, that's like any, any other artist I can think of, so in that sense you can only deal with reality in such a way. JOHN TUSA: Yes I can see that if you set out to be spiritual that falls into the category of making large gestures, large claims, and you're bound to end up in bombast and presumption, and therefore the only way to actually get some sort of spiritual understanding is almost to, to back away from it, to conceal it. One of the characteristics of your work is that very often the painting itself isn't enough to understand what's going on. The title is essential and quite often something additional. The most famous of these is of course the painting of a man on skis fallen over on the snow, his face is covered over, and that's another issue, the title is the Architect, but you need to know that the architect is Hitler's architect Albert Speer. Now isn't the painting weaker because you need an explanation to understand it? LUC TUYMANS: The thing is just that I explain those things to be complete, and of course no doubt imagery comes from somewhere as this image is derived from somewhere, and art historians and people that will dig into the work will clearly be able to find out where imagery comes from, originated from, so then they will make the links themselves. That is the building joke into the work itself. For me and actually also for the public I don't think it's really important to know completely, or for me to force that type of meaningfulness upon the public. I give the information because the information is valid and it gives you at least a chance to either get away from it or to get stuck in it, because there is a clear defined gap between what I speak about or how I explain things and what the visual is. JOHN TUSA: But in that particular painting if we don't know that it is Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, then the painting is much less interesting and much less powerful, so we'd miss an enormous amount. LUC TUYMANS: If you don't know what you're looking at you will see a person in the snow. You will see that at the borders of the painting there is a sort of bluishness, a sort of radiant bluish image that gives you the idea of projected image, so you will, you will know you are looking at something that has been mediatised or is delivered through the media towards you. Looking at the pointed shapes of the skis you will see that it is somewhat dated, it's not a new skiing gear or whatever, and it's also reductive in its size. Looking through the blocked offness of the sort of collage nearly blocked offness of the face that it is in deterrent that you look at it, you recognise the element of failure but as an open gap, you have to fill it in. So my idea to make this painting was actually also based upon the ideas of the architect Albert Speer himself who wrote about the, the element of, it was an element to make, he didn't really build that much basically, he designed a lot... JOHN TUSA: He gave the concept. LUC TUYMANS: But not really a great deal survived, so you have this element of architecture and snow as the element of things that dissolve, and so in that sense the architect could still be a possibility, it would not only be, but of course it will not be Speer. JOHN TUSA: In fact would you almost rather that we read the painting as, as clearly as that and weren't worried about the title, I think it's sometimes suggested that it's essential that we know the subtext and the title, but from the way you've just described that painting if we read it like that it's still a painting with an enormous amount of meaning. LUC TUYMANS: No it just, just, the idea is that I give this information out because that's, as I said, to be complete, so nobody has to go look for the image where it has come from, they can through my information clearly go to it and you can make, compare, because the element is also, it's the whole idea of how things, they're not, they're not copies of the imagery, they're different things, but at least you have the chance to compare. JOHN TUSA: You mentioned the face in that painting which is blocked over, in fact you've painted very few faces and most of those faces are either masked or blotted out or deliberately concealed by sunglasses, or they're the faces of the sick or the dead. What is this saying about the human face, that it almost carries too much meaning? LUC TUYMANS: I'm not, I'm clearly not interested in, in, in sort of rendering of the psychology of the portrait. It's not my thing, I'm not interested in that. I'm much more interested in the symptomatic of a, or the more traumatising element within the face, which is symptomatic, something different, therefore also my interest into this diagnostic view to which I made one alteration that I changed all the eyes so that they will not come to the spectator, there will be no personal contact and no ability from the spectator to actually make even a psychological contact with the image. JOHN TUSA: Why aren't you interested in the psychology of the human face, isn't that one of the richest things there is? LUC TUYMANS: Well there is a lot of lying to a point because there is one painting in the show that clearly does that and that's the bearded man that is in the space with a smirk that actually looks at you with a sort of disdain and is hung near approximately of the big still life, so there, so there are some things that, but even there there is this element of trying to then go to the wax image in the Natural History Museum or something more squirky or more unidentified. I think I like that because probably that has to do especially with how you look at the world. I mean how you define faces, how you remember them and how you also play them out. JOHN TUSA: And similarly with the human body, most of the paintings where there's anything to do with the human body consists of bits of it, detached limbs, or bodies without heads, or a man's bottom bending over in anticipation of some violent act, it's entirely, you take one look at it and we know there's going to be an act of violence don't we, the, the viewer has already done it. This is a very bleak view of the human body isn't it? LUC TUYMANS: Well it's a bleak view of humanity altogether so, and that probably has to do with a decisive idea of not wanting to be deceived. There is this notion that I myself have a humongous distrust against imagery, so even the imagery will have its own distrust for itself, even towards me that has made it. JOHN TUSA: And the distrust consists of, of what, because there you are creating this powerful complex imagery, but is the distrust a basic part of your own attitude to it? LUC TUYMANS: I think so. Within the ambiguity of what is represented that distrustfulness puts itself out, and time and time again I have tried to even avoid that and it has never worked in a sense that's probably also why man is limited I suppose. JOHN TUSA: You've been accused of practising evasion as one of your techniques, though that occurs to me that's a very double edged remark in many respects that you can be evading and I think you've implied that you are evading all sorts of things deliberately, but the charge was that you are not addressing things directly enough and that being evasive in what you say and how you say it, but is the idea of evasion at all relevant to what you do? LUC TUYMANS: I, I don't see it as evasion I see it as a different way of making things more precise. If choice would be evasion then everything would be evasion I suppose. There are things that strike me, there are things that stay with me for a long time and then, only then are made. They're made in a reductive form and that reductive form is the form that I, I've chosen but it's also my limitation, so I don't see that as an evasion. I see that more, moreover clearly as a defined ultimate ending space, where of course the idea could arise that something is evaporating or something is crumbling or within this productiveness sort of like vanishes, but even that vanishing point is painted so that's pretty clear. JOHN TUSA: You used the word limitation. LUC TUYMANS: Yeah. JOHN TUSA: What do you see is your limitation? LUC TUYMANS: The limitation is the limitation that everybody has that you go to a point where you have to assess your limitation, that's what painting basically does. If you wouldn't do that you would paint forever, I mean and no visual would be clarified, no visual would be shown and no visual would be finished. JOHN TUSA: Can you imagine moving away from your current expressive range, what we'll just call the bleached look, can you imagine a time when that would not satisfy what you wanted to express? LUC TUYMANS: I don't know may, maybe it will. I mean I think that the way the work evolves you can see clear bridges, form of bridges from the far more graphical, the more conceptual edged works like Antichambre or La Correspondence, from thereon it goes back much more to the graphic element into the imagery and becomes much more elaborate, 'til the very end where now the painting is much more painterly again than it is for example in comparison to Schwarzheider or any other paintings from those days. JOHN TUSA: Of your latest paintings the one just called Still Life, and I think the largest painting in this particular show, there it is it's the apples, the jug, the crockery, what could be more like the quintessential still life, and yet though it's not about 9:11, it was somehow painted in the aftermath of, of 9:11. Now what exactly was the transaction in your own mind which even connected 9:11 with that painting? LUC TUYMANS: Well first of all my wife and I we were in the States when this thing happened and, now this painting was also sort of like deliberately painted for the Documenta, the second Documenta, I was in the one of, Documenta 11 I think, and there was of course this news expectation after the Flemish, the Belgian Pavilion coming up with a personal post-colonial content, which of course I wouldn't have done because I thought that would be very disrespectful anyway, but anyway I was working on something completely different but then through the shock of this event where you have this sort of attack on our own aesthetics so to speak, that type of perfection which cannot be reproduced in a way, I came to the opposite thought and the opposite thought was to an element of restoration but one with a twist in terms that it would be the lowest category in painting which is the still life hierarchically but blown out of proportions. During the process of making it the whole still life was sort of like isolately shoved up into the imagery where it becomes like placeless, it floats. I took down, or toned down the contrast, so that it looked like a projected imagery, so in a sense it becomes a wholeness that is no longer consumable and a truly abstract or ephemeral image in its, in all its grandness, and that was not only it's, it's, it's a Western European statement but it's also a statement has to do with the element of globalism, it also had to do especially with the aftermath of, of, of 9:11, and that, that was maybe cynical or not but that was the approach that was behind, or the idea behind the still life. JOHN TUSA: You're famous, you're praised, your paintings sell for huge sums, has this changed you? LUC TUYMANS: Has this changed me? It, it luckily hasn't changed the way I approach or deploy or work or paint, it has changed my life, of course it has, I mean it would be stupid to deny that. It has actually overcomplicated my life more than it has solved problems. JOHN TUSA: Why, there's so much business to do? LUC TUYMANS: No, there are many complications that go alongside the fact that your paintings are worth a lot of money. It makes transportation costs exceedingly expensive. It reduces your platforms, because people are very anxious to what happens to the work they own, insurance... JOHN TUSA: But that's their responsibility not yours. LUC TUYMANS: No no but it's also the responsibility of an institution to come up with the money to even organise the transportation costs, so that's why I mean, so that's one complication that comes alongside that. On the other hand of course it gives you the possibility to live a more luxurious life, but then again I felt we had been able to assess that type of success or that type of, 'cos that's not virtually what interests me. JOHN TUSA: And you've been able to keep the element of fame and the people saying oh I want your painting for this museum or that museum or this apartment, you've been able to keep that at a distance from what you actually do and how you work? LUC TUYMANS: Yeah because that's part of the art world, that's what people want, that's what people assess, that's also part of me in, in sense that it's, it's clearly my ambition to become a big painter, so when you have that ambition you have to fulfil it in order to get rid of it. JOHN TUSA: Was that always your ambition to be a big painter? LUC TUYMANS: Yeah, yeah initially it was, it was my ambition to be a big painter, it still is in the point that if not for somebody else then at least for myself, and it started out as a sort of self-chosen isolation, which you do with painting because it's a very isolating act. You know you do it alone. You can do a collaboration but they mostly fail but I mean you can try, but mainly it's a very, it's a very loner existence in that sense. JOHN TUSA: But do you think you have not yet become the big painter that you would like to be in your ambition? LUC TUYMANS: Well I don't perceive it as such, because I'm very, I'm very perfectionist. I can still see mistakes in the works that exist, which I think is normal. There are also works that become after years fairly more difficult to retrace and therefore more interesting. JOHN TUSA: So is there something that you feel that you need to do to achieve your ambition of being a great painter by your own recognition? LUC TUYMANS: Yeah it's, it's like I said in the beginning you choose this isolation in the beginning, which is a self-chosen one. Once the work is shown of course your space is perverted, which is normal, I mean it's not something to be worried about, but of course then once you then on top of that become successful you have altered your self-chosen isolation into a public isolation, which is a different ballgame, but of course attention will flow away and time will heal all wounds and eventually you will have to retrieve yourself to yet again a different work of assessing what you are doing. JOHN TUSA: So the self-assessment is constant? LUC TUYMANS: Self-censorship and self-assessment is an extremely big part of the game in painting because it has all to do with the sharpness within what you and therefore I don't really think there is evolution in painting, there never was evolution in painting. Painting was always the same, it was always about this clarification within space and time which is painted time, has nothing to do with real time. JOHN TUSA: Luc Tuymans thank you very much. |
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