Interview with artist Andrew Morrow

Scott Waters

Scott Waters: With your work’s emphasis on compositing and appropriated imagery I feel I need to ask how you view the role of technical and craft-based painting compared to, not necessarily photography, but the proliferation of digital imagery and fantasy worlds? I think specifically of the film adaptations of the Frank Miller comics 300 and Sin City as examples where mechanical methods increasingly encroach on painting’s territory of visually filtered realism. You seem to be at once acknowledging and validating the bombardment of imagery in a consumer-capitalist art-system but simultaneously asserting our humanity, our aggression, fragility and confusion, slowing down this bombardment through your temporally drawn-out process of painting.

Andrew Morrow: I think that if contemporary painting can be said to counter its cultural context, it is largely in relation to the emergence of new media. My feeling is that painting, at least since the democratization of photography in the late eighteen hundreds, has existed in a state of, if not permanent then intermittent, existential crisis. Painting feels the need to both question and assert its relevancy and never more so than now, in a time when computer technology seems able to match many of the historical functions of painting.

Inevitably we return to the question of what differentiates painting from other modes of visual communication. The first answer is obvious and lies in painting’s materiality, which is being fore-grounded in the work of many contemporary painters. Kim Dorland, a Canadian painter, who paints with such thickness that his massive globs of paint have to be reinforced with nails driven directly into the canvas, is a clear example of this. Despite the imagistic possibilities of digital technology, there is still some wonder to be experienced in the analogue process of applying pigment in medium to a flat surface.

Painting also brings along its rich history. As David Salle said in the eighties, the historical baggage that makes painting so ponderous and in some ways, arcane, is also what make it great. Painting, due largely to an insular tradition of self-referentiality, he said, can be its own referent. This is what I believe gives painting some of its power. Painting can, through habit and association, apprehend aspects of contemporary visual culture, and through re-contextualization, shift meaning. In my work, images are pulled from their original context and shifted into a critical and deconstructive take on contemporary masculinity and painting. This is what Neo Rauch calls the peristaltic process, the method whereby an artist absorbs his/her external environment, which is then processed and excreted, transformed and shifted through a subjective process. In my case, an appropriated image of an athlete, heroic and idealized, can be shifted to speak more of the pornographizing of the human body, or of the human capacity for physical violence.

SC: What we might call your Baroque aesthetic offers a grand spectacle that, in a contemporary context, comes from a place of fracture and uncertainty. You offer us imagery you see as relevant and compelling along a certain trajectory. Also though, I think about your reference to Rauch and the filtering process. It seems that Rauch is presenting himself principally as a fallen away Social Realist but this personality seems somewhat staged. He’s not just filtering but also actively creating a persona for himself as artist. So to amiably pose the question to you, are you choosing imagery that also stands in for the most exciting version of yourself? Can we see your work as emphasizing an idealized and personalized collection of imagery and stories, what we might see as a hybrid of Baroque and Post Modern aesthetics?

AM: I am not sure that I agree entirely with the question, mostly because I am incapable of imaging any one Post Modern aesthetic. I feel that I am currently distancing myself from what was once a strong Baroque sensibility in my painting. First, I would like to explain my particular understanding of the broadly definable term of the Baroque. For me, this word signals visual excess: in detail, dynamism, and an indulgent employment of the spectacle. In my paintings, this is exemplified by moments of high tension, the over saturation, and the high contrast lighting. It is said the Baroque movement arose from the Church, who wanted to shift ecclesiastical painting and sculpture from the highly intellectualized Mannerist style, to a more direct, populist approach that could be understood by the visual illiterate.

This seems to be where we are today, although today’s viewer is, in some ways, highly literate, capable of easily navigating a heterogeneous visual landscape. Returning to my own work, I would say that my relationship to spectacular imaging is wavering; at times I am very democratic in my making, and at other times my paintings are less broadly accessible, speaking more directly to a specialized audience, well-versed in discussions of painting.

Lastly, in response to this question of identity construction through painting, I would start by saying that I’m probably not representing an idealized version of myself - unless of course, we accept a somewhat neurotic, doubtful, narcissistic, violent and over-sexed man as an ideal. I think what is being shown in my work, is a highly self-conscious, and somewhat compressed identity. I have found no system of creation that results in a painting that allows for the vast contradiction and variance typical of any human being, so the paintings I make tend to orbit around a dozen or so attributes or consciousnesses that I feel are self-defining. Because of the somewhat obsessional nature of my art-making, and probably art-making in general, I find myself tending towards repetition, inevitably returning to the loft like a homing pigeon. Even my greatest efforts at circumvention seem bound to certain characteristic ways of thinking and being which are then played out on the canvas.

SW: As cool, unimpassioned and aloof as much Post Modern art might be, its construction is often more prosaic, its methods more accessible to the viewer than your level of unattainable illusion (practioner and non-practioner alike). There is an operatic marvel and amplified sensuality that is common throughout your work. Do you see importance in reasserting the sense of wonder (and the cult of technical skill) that painted illusion offers the viewer in the wake of restrained and pedestrian Post Modern methods?

AM: My paintings are less a reaction to Post-Modernity than to a regional trend in art that was prevalent during a formative time in my practice. When I first started painting my large scale works, the Royal Art Lodge in Winnipeg and Marcel Dzama in particular, had a strong influence on the Canadian art scene. In Toronto, where I lived at the time, many artists were producing intimate, diaristic drawings, often faux-naïve and sometimes naïve-naïve in style. Although I was able to appreciate the works, I was much more interested in making paintings, and not at all engaged in feigned skill-lessness.

It wasn’t until I saw Jan Matejko’s King Jan III Sobieski at Vienna (1883), a massive war painting in Vatican in Rome, that I decided to work in direct opposition to what I was seeing in some contemporary art-making. I decided to produce paintings that were skilful, decadent and ostentatious. My idea was not only to use the language of history painting, which I found exhilarating, but also to address its problems, to revisit it from a contemporary perspective. Specifically, I wanted to question the possibility of a unified, decisive historical moment. I wanted to amplify and exaggerate the heroism and exaltation typical of historical documentation. I wanted to expose the circular nature of history, often de-prioritized in a system that aggrandizes the instance. This emphasis on the illusionistic potential in painting was rooted in ambition, for myself and for painting. I wanted to create work that would appeal to the casual gallery visitor, but I was also aiming for acceptance by the art elites. There was a desire to impress, which, while still present, seems to be waning.

SW: If we are to address the figures throughout your work, but specifically in Oh, Happy Meat, we view the central forms of the heroic male and distressed female. Do they stand in as violent, idealized versions of the world? Does this ideal lean towards a yearning for disavowed notions of heroics or are they perhaps more a reference to the frenzy of the world around us; chaotic but equivalent in its many versions of chaos to the point of being white noise

AM: Yes and no. I consider this pair, formally speaking, as a moment of stability. This is a fixed centre in a shifting and spiralling vortex. For me, the idealized couple in the center, a contemporized version of the central figures from West’s Death on a Pale Horse (1796), provide a moment of stillness, but one predicated on a fiction. They represent a fantasy, an unattainable standard to which we are all held. All around them, this fantasy is dissolving into violent and lascivious chaos.

SW: In Anthony Swofford’s military memoir, Jarhead, he asserts that all war films, no matter what their agenda, are pro-war if you buy into the myth of combat. If your paintings refer to the loss of the male archetype, do you see that they might operate in a similar manner, condemning while affirming this archetype and, perhaps, even mourning its loss?

AM: I would say there is an element of mourning here and a certain degree of projection. Leon Golub, towards the latter twenty years of his production, arrived at the conclusion that although his paintings (such as the Mercenaries series from the early eighties) could be seen as condemnations of male violence, they also evidence a degree of sympathy and an embodiment of these brutal states. The same could be said of my work. While I am lamenting the un-attainability of a masculine ideal, I am also revelling in its fantasy and assuring its continued existence.

SW: If we can accept the fracturing of history and objective truths do you see a place where we can lose sight of catastrophe’s unifying compassion and outrage, where subjectivity leaves no one as the oppressor? More specific to your paintings, is there a possibility for directed compassion and clarity when bombarded by competing stories from innumerable trajectories?

AM: Andrea Fitzpatrick, an art theory professor at the University of Ottawa, once explained to me that she believed that we had emerged from the nihilistic equivalency of Post-Modernity into an era defined by a particular understanding of French critic Roland Barthes’ notion of the ‘punctum’. This concept, first introduced in Camera Lucida, is for Barthes, an emotional reaction provoked in the viewer by a particular detail in a photograph. For Andrea, the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 represented a cultural emergence of the ‘punctum’. The images from this tragedy were able to emerge from the oversaturation and equivalency of Post Modern visual culture, and to reintroduce the possibility of meaning in the wake of an ironic and distanced cultural posturing. So, instead of viewing the dissolution of hierarchy as a move away from meaning or truth, which was the common perception towards the turn of the century, we now see the world commensurately with the possibility that something might puncture or emerge from this sameness.

In my work, this is seen in an overriding desire for meaning from a culture of excess. There are small moments such as understated, autobiographical gestures or textual affirmations of hope that function as oases. Sometimes these are more pessimistic: moments of brutality, violence or disaster. At the heat of my work is a worried relationship with hope: the hope for meaning, the hope for truth, the desire for hope itself, even.

SW: I’ve asked about your compositing (and perhaps composting) of these source images as a reference to and realignment of the Post Modern strain. Can we also look to these chaotic scenes as having some sort of blended history, even attempting an after-the-fall, if highly subjective, singular narrative?

AM: To some degree I answered this question in the last one, but there is more that can be said here. Directly, no, I do not expect my work to be conclusive and go to great efforts to avoid this. I have always found closed systems in painting to be quite a let down. When a polemic is too clearly stated, a painting is reduced to a message delivery system. Once the information has been transmitted, the painting’s function has been served and as a viewer, I am ready to move on. This can happen with even the most elaborate and skilfully painted works. For me, painting is a very delicate balancing act. At the beginning of a work, I often have a particular idea in mind, which can sometimes take over the canvas. When this happens, I often introduce something quite oppositional to my initial idea in order to confuse the reading. Another strategy is to shift the reading more subtly, through deliberate obfuscation of certain details in order to retain a sense of ambiguity.

SW: In reference to the question of catastrophe’s ability to eclipse the sameness of the Post Modern paradigm, do you see your work as looking to the future, perhaps as metaphorical attempts to envision a place where the heated chaos of the present reaches a tipping point? Though this is an unfair question do you see, at least in your paintings, a trajectory on which we are headed?

AM: I do see my work as largely metaphoric. My paintings are an expression of the ambivalence and uncertainty that I see as defining characteristics of contemporary existence, painting and masculine identity. They are at once highly authored, but largely appropriative; they are ambitious and domineering, but perennially insecure and doubting. They are sensitive and patriarchal, pornographic but oddly asexual, violent but also un-bloodied. They are heterogeneous, fragmented, inconclusive and hopeful, in the same way that painting and society are today. So to answer your question about society’s projected clarity or lucidity would be largely disingenuous. Any answer I, or my paintings, could provide would be speculative, uncertain and coloured by hubris and bluster. As a guess, though, I would say that we are moving towards neither more hysteria, nor cool lucidity. Borrowing a phrase from vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin, I suspect that we’re going to just ‘keep on, keepin’ on’.

Andrew Morrow is a Canadian painter, based in Chelsea, Quebec. His work, often large in scale, is contradictory and ineffable, often reflecting a shifting relationship to both masculinity and the contemporary practice of painting. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, and is currently pursuing his Master of Fine Arts on full scholarship at the University of Ottawa. In addition to his studies and practice as an artist, he is active as a teacher, mentor and public speaker.

Morrow has exhibited widely throughout Canada, including the Sudbury Art Gallery; the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; the McMaster Museum of Art, the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John; and the Edmonton Art Gallery. Morrow’s work is in many private and public collections, including the royal Norwegian collection; Kingston City Hall; and the St. Regis Hotel, San Francisco. He is represented by the Edward Day Gallery, Toronto.

Morrow’s work has been reviewed in Canadian Art, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Eye Magazine, NOW Magazine, La Vie Des Arts, and on CBC Television and Radio, among others. He was recently included in the Magenta Foundations publication, Carte Blanche Vol. 2: Painting, a survey of contemporary Canadian painting.

Morrow is the recipient of many grants and awards, short-listed for the RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2004, and the Toronto Arts Council Foundation Emerging Artist Award in 2007.

Andrew Morrow <andrew@andrewmorrow.com>