also see photos AMONG THE BELIEVERS
'WE HAVE BROUGHT TORTURE AND MISERY IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM'
Harold Pinter,2005
ANOTHER TIME ANOTHER PLACE
In April 2003 the coalition forces led by the US and the UK invaded Iraq. The show Among the Believers (Septmember 2004, Foster Art, London) was made in response to these events and their still ongoing, unresolved aftermath. To accompany the show a catalogue with same title (ISBN I 90117794 94 7) was produced. The catalogue can be ordered on request.
Madeleine Strindberg: Among the Believers is specifically about political events in Iraq since spring 2003. It is also about the way the media presented these events to us. And it is about painting. It is questioning whether painting is an adequate and relevant medium to address political events at a time of continual saturation by mass media information.
The two parts of Among the Believers are substantially different, both visually as well as in their intent. The downstairs floor is an installation focusing on the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing devastation and destruction. The aggressors are symbolised by helicopters, which are activated with glittering fairy lights. These are juxtaposed with images of wreckages of bombed-out vehicles or buses.
The upstairs apart of the show focuses on the human aspect, the absurdity and the tragic misjudgement of a situation. It highlights specific moments based on images during the war, then constructs a fairy-tale setting in which the events are set. The trilogy upstairs consists of three paintings: Which Way is actually taken from a pre-Iraq image from Afghanistan; the central painting, Among the Believers, is based on a photograph taken of soldiers in one of Saddam’s palaces; and Get Out is based on a photograph of soldiers during the war. The small white and silver panels of body parts and details of weapons throughout the show function as punctuation marks.
AM0NG THE BELIEVERS
Mel Gooding: This is one of the strongest body of works Madeleine Strindberg has made, a very coherent body of work. In terms of what it’s dealing with, it is so direct, so powerful, so moving and in some ways so ambiguous. It’s the ambiguity of the work that strikes me as very interesting and that’s something I want to explore in our conversation. There’s a sense of coming in to a statement or a complex set of reflections on something that I think for many of us is at the front of our minds at the moment.
As far as Iraq is concerned we now have the final report of the investigating body into Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Whatever is said now we know that at the time there was no ambiguity and no doubt at all about that being the reason why two powerful countries decided to flout the United Nations, not to wait for the few weeks that were required for the investigator to make his report. That report – I think those who took us into that war knew this – would more or less have been negative, would have to say that there was no evidence. This didn’t mean that they didn’t have the weapons, but if there was no evidence then presumably the whole ‘adventure’ would be called into question before it began, as indeed it was by a huge number of people in this country. We’re talking about enough people to have generated the largest demonstration in the history of this country. So we are dealing here with a body of work which in a way responds to an extraordinary and ongoing and immediate situation, and in that sense it’s like looking paintings by, say, Sargent in the middle of the First World War.
Any work of this kind that simply responds in a literal way will be limited in its interest, and what interests me about this body of work is that the response to a particular situation seems to me to be one that carries us beyond it. Not away from it but beyond it. It takes this particular subject matter and then uses it to make work which has implications that go beyond the immediate circumstance. If it was simply outrage it expressed then it would be maybe interesting, but it might not be interesting as art, as this seems to me to be. It’s the complexity of the response that is embodied or codified in these paintings, a complexity that seems to me to make this such a strong body of powerful work. So my interest in it goes far beyond the immediacy of which I spoke at the beginning. Just looking at the images in this room, one realises that these images, although they may be specific, are also generic. They’re images of our time, but not of just this time. They’re images that could have been created, that could have reflected realities, any time in the last forty to fifty years.
Madeleine Strindberg: All the work is very specific, based on images from the recent war with Iraq, but I wanted them to have a broader significance as well. Maybe I have to go back to how this series began.
I’ve always been interested in politics and the Middle East in particular, and quite separately also in newspapers and the way they infiltrate our lives. About ten years ago I made my first project based entirely based on newspaper headlines, which was then taken up again in ’99 by a large-scale project, a projection on the TWA screen in Leicester Square featuring newspaper headlines juxtaposed with painted images, often subverting the text. In ’99 in Transmission, a show held at the British Council in Bologna, the focus was in the photographic images, which were manipulated and altered, whereas in April 2003 at the International Biennale 6 held in Sharjah, UAE I also included a field of razor-bladed oranges and lemons with three paintings, some of which featured headlines.
Next to my personal interest in politics, as well as a strong conviction and humanitarian responsibility that underpins my work I have equally had a fascination with the sheer visual beauty of images seen in newspapers. So in the beginning there was my interest in newspapers and their representation of events which then became superseded by the actual events. The two became inseparable. What was initially a take on their representation became increasingly a comment on the actual events, and with it inevitably a personal interpretation of these events.
How can one – why would one want to – compete with images so powerful, so iconic and moving as photographs of real events? I was searching for an answer as to how to make work that has the capacity to respond to what is happening around me without being anecdotal, images that could move and question and to a certain degree document a reality while being entirely based on second-hand information. It was a search to make new images that followed their own rules, to build a parallel world. I had to find ways to transform the images and shift the focus from reportage to storytelling.
The more I learnt about the events in Iraq the harder I found it to suppress my rage. Wherever I looked I saw casualties (of their beliefs) in a war masterminded by fervent believers – both the Iraqi schoolchildren in an exploded bus and the soldiers themselves who lost parts of their bodies and died, all victims of beliefs. Like thousands of people in this country I went on the protest marches, but of course nobody took the slightest notice. How was it possible that the whole nation was rushed into a war nobody wanted? And how can you make work about political events without being didactic?
I deliberately chose the very obvious images. For instance, the helicopters are very much a cliché of modern warfare. The headlines on the paintings are also very much clichés of themselves, appropriated from a different context, quite often from the travel or the holiday section of the same paper, but their juxtaposition is subversive. One very obvious reality is combined with another very obvious but completely incongruous reality, with an end result that aims to unsettle and disturb.
Barry Barker: Your particular way is working from secondary material, because they are newspaper images and because you’re not there first-hand. What is very interesting about this group of works and the show as a whole is that you, against great odds, have turned those secondary images into primary images in terms of a painting, and I’m sure you’re conscious of that – it’s like the next step. They are paintings, and though one is aware of the references that you make to photographic images, I think really you’ve gone into another phase now, you’ve taken on the responsibility of turning those secondary images into primary images. The only reference I can think of is way, way back, somebody like Gerhard Richter’s Baader Meinhof series and things like that. What I find interesting about this show is they’re very interesting paintings.
Mel Gooding: I think that’s terribly important. You remove the work from the topicality, without necessarily denying that topicality – the press image, the television image, the occasions for the making of this painted image. What you have made is something quite different, and a whole range of things being used, colour, scale and the use of lights. The use of language: ‘Another Time, Another Place’ and so on. All of these and the titles also, which have introduced the linguistic element, give you something else to work with.
Madeleine Strindberg: Although they’re paintings I see the show very much as an installation. The work is specifically made for this space. It needs to take possession of the room and actively interact with it. The work needs to be installed, rather than hung. I don’t see any of the paintings in isolation, there is a general interdependence that makes them inseparable. That’s also where the fairy lights and the ex-army stretcher on the floor and the bricks on which the paintings rest come into play. All these extraneous elements are there to unsettle and disrupt the viewer, to remind him of another more concrete reality. Maybe I wanted an overall transgression of the aesthetics that are normally applied to painting.
TILES
Mel Gooding: What the show demonstrates is that painting can do a whole range of quite different things, that keeps it alive. And what are the different things you’re doing here? Barry called them secondary, meaning mediated, images: images that are from photographs and television images. Behind those mediations is the actuality. The burnt-out school bus, the flotilla of helicopters moving in, the troops taking a break, the camel or the donkey that walks past the tank: these are real incidents but we only see them in the photographs – they’re still mediated for us, they’re still secondary. What makes painting interesting is that if you turn them into primary events, instead of being images of something that is mediated, we are now confronted with an event itself, which is the painting. Your desire as an artist is actually to make that event – that’s why you talk about the limitation of painting and why you always want to do other things with it. It’s as if reality is often so extraordinary, so painful, so complex, so beautiful, that no particular way could do it. What you see is ‘the doer’ and the ‘done to’. And you see it also stated explicitly. ‘Another time, another place’ is a romantic cliché, and here it is transported into an image of another kind of rendezvous altogether, the rendezvous of the helicopters and the victims of the helicopters.
Peter Kalkof: But isn’t that really aestheticising violence?
Mel Gooding: Yes, exactly like The Battle of San Remo or any one of a number of great paintings that address this kind of issue or this kind of event. Of course it aestheticises violence, and that’s what we require in order to be able to encompass it within our own reality. We’re not there, and that’s what painting is for. Aestheticising doesn’t mean of course turning it into something feeble or weak or not up to the reality. To aestheticise something is to put it into the realm of impact upon the senses: aesthesis is the reception of body, of the sense of a particular experience. The secondary images rob us of that contact. The primary image that painting brings to it, or can bring to it, does exactly the opposite. It recreates, in a sense, and it works – through documentary record and through direct impact on our eyes and upon the senses in that way. The yellows, the oranges have a particular impact upon us; the silvers have an impact upon us. These impacts are complex, they have to do with immediate aesthethis, immediate reception; they also have to do with the way in which we then associate these immediacies with other things altogether. With our own histories, with our own histories of other art. So I agree with you, Peter, of course they aestheticise violence, that’s what paintings are supposed to do.
Peter Kalkof: Nevertheless the issue is, the political situation in the world nowadays with tremendous violence and aggression, and anybody who has actually had the notion, what it actually means . . .
Barry Barker: I think that’s interesting. I’ve experienced violence and I’m sure other people have. The point is, nobody wants to aestheticise violence. What’s happening is that we receive images of violence, and sometimes we’re artists, photographers, playwrights, and people read images as certain things but I think there’s a process in between. Unless one has experienced physical violence, which a lot of people have, how to aestheticise, how do you render that?
Mel Gooding: Maybe you can’t, maybe paintings aren’t doing it. It is exactly the point one is trying to make.
Barry Barker: Certain images of violence are aesthetic. I mean those dreadful photographs of those people in Guantanamo Bay with the American soldiers playing games with them, they were trying to do something with these images. But the relationship between real violence and how it is expressed in an artistic way, whether it’s writing or through plays or visual images, is another thing.
Mel Gooding: It’s a matter of aesthetics. The point about photography, the point about television, is precisely that it anaesthetises – anaesthetises – the violence from us. In other words we look again and again and after a while this is nothing new. If you show endless images of small black children with extended stomachs, after a while people are deadened. That is what anaesthetises mean – but aesthethis means bringing to life through the immediacy of impact, and that’s the difference between the secondary and the primary and that’s what I think you’re getting at when you talk about the limitations of painting, that you want to press it further forward. You want to push it into our field of feeling in a direct and immediate way. That’s why I think the stretcher’s down there – because you can’t get round that, there’s a physical object, it’s a reminder of the reality that these paintings reflect. Of course the work aestheticises this violence because that’s what art is supposed to do. That is what art exists to do.
Jeanne Masoero: I was going to say it’s like religious art, isn’t it? You go to any church and see images of torture and death all around, you know, the stations of the cross, these are images of violence and they are meant to …
Mel Gooding: To hit you, strike you.
Jeanne Masoero: Yes, but also transport you into another kind of world.
Mel Gooding: Could we just pick up the point of the lights, the fairy lights on the painting. What they do is to remind us forcibly of something that’s happening in all the paintings and that is that there’s a strange kind of distancing going on as well as well as the immediacy of impact.
INCIDENT
Barry Barker: It’s the ambiguity.
Mel Gooding: Yes, and part of their power comes from them not being reportage. They are not just a reflection but, as I might say it, a refraction. The refraction of something, for example, in water. It distorts the image, it changes the image, it bends the image, and that’s what these paintings do. They refract the image through these acid yellows and oranges, these highly vibrant, brilliant colours. Colours we might associate with fairgrounds or joyful things or whatever. They’re not dark paintings of dark events, they’re brilliant. You know, we’re back to another kind of aesthetic here. What is going on here is something to do with ambiguity and irony, and I think the more ambiguity, the more difficulty of this kind, the more powerful the work becomes. The less immediate the message is, the more I’m interested. I can’t explain these images and I’m not going to set out to try to, but I find them not just striking and vital and immediate – but also very puzzling and very problematic. I’m not quite sure what’s going on. All I know is that if I see a flotilla of helicopters moving in, ‘Another time, another place’, and then it’s illuminated by the string of frivolous lights, then something is happening about what we do with that image. We can’t just say, ‘Ah we know what that is’ – we have to look to what it is that we do when we’re confronted by those realities.
Barry Barker: I think the lights work extremely well downstairs and it’s a good beginning to this exhibition. I have three ideas about it, they’re just ideas, not critical analysis. The first one is that the battle between painting and something else is a constructive one, because I mean if you do a painting and you stick a load of lights all over it, then they’re going to fight. The second one is a kind of distraction and I here want to go back to the beginning of television. We all got tellies in ’53 for the coronation. Somebody said it’s bad for you, you really need to stick a light on the top of the telly because of your eyes. So there’s that kind of duality. It’s like, what am I looking at? A telly, but I can’t see it because I’m staring at this dreadful crinoline lady with a lampshade. And strangely enough there is also a kind of biographical element in the work, in the sense that you have your paintings and there’s this kind of constructive conflict downstairs with those lights, which could be biographical.
Mel Gooding: What you’re really saying is, one way or the other, with the autobiography thrown in, it’s a kind of alienating device, in a sense that it’s a way of forcing you not to be simply seduced by the painting or by the subject of the painting. It makes you think, what’s that doing there? What’s happening?
Madeleine Strindberg: That is something that is really important. I am attempting to initially seduce the viewer, to draw people in, by making the paintings as beautiful as possible, decorative if you want. Brightly coloured, even pretty, while simultaneously talking about horrific events. I’m leading people one way to attract, but then force them to wake up to something else, to something one would maybe not want to see or think about. The work turns on itself by combining all these different elements, trashy lights and the actuality of the stretcher in the floor, the incongruity of the headlines and the dehumanised soldiers
metamorphosing into teddy bear-like creatures. What are they exactly? Victims or perpetrators? Actually – have you noticed? – it’s only the soldiers that metamorphose. The only intact, well, almost intact human person is the faceless boy on the donkey in Which Way. Interestingly enough, during one of the preceding gallery talks somebody spotted the biblical reference.
And then there is the silver, why all the silver? I am using the silver, or rather aluminium paint, for its semi-industrial quality, for not being a colour. But also there is a strongly photographic, maybe filmic, feel or reference to all the work. Photography in its initial stages employed a technique called silver gelatin prints. The term has always appealed to me, and I feel is somewhere very relevant to the work.
In the same way I don’t see the work upstairs as a triptych but prefer to call it a trilogy, or maybe more accurately sequence, as it refers to the sequential nature of the work and also implies a more temporal element as well.
It’s this complexity of references that’s so crucial to the work. It’s very important to me that they look deceptively simple, brash at times like children’s books, but are multilayered in their meaning and content. It’s the transformation that happens during the making of the paintings that takes the images away from being literal and forces the viewer to question their meaning.
TILESMel Gooding: It’s a complex culture we live in, that’s really the point I think you’re making – what the teddy bear image represents, what the silver represents is . . . Those lights exist in the same world, they represent if you like an aspect of our world that is absolutely contemporaneous to the second with the flight of the helicopters. Those helicopters, even as we speak they’re going in somewhere. If it wasn’t Iraq it would probably be somewhere else and even as they go in we are sitting here discussing art, you know, in the trivial – if you like, the lights . . . I don’t think it’s a bad thing, you see. I think it’s a very good thing that we’re here trying to work out this problematic relationship between the painting and the reality. Between the way in which we live one kind of life – having a drink of wine and so on – at the same time as we’re reading in the newspapers of what’s happening . . . You know, ‘human kind cannot bear much reality’. We have to live as we live but what the lights in a way represent is that other side of it. These lights exist, we’ll turn them on, we can turn them off. What we can’t do is anything about what’s going to happen in another time, in another place, or with another set of helicopter gunships.
One of the things I was thinking about coming here, was that historically of course what you’re doing was in the hierarchy of genre and this was the highest: history painting. In a way I think what you’re doing with the lights, with the teddy bears and with the rest, is saying we can’t make history paintings like that any more. We can’t paint these events as heroic. We can’t paint these events as if they can be assimilated into a mythological narrative which reflects our values and our religion and our history and so on, we can’t do that. So when I said it was an alienating device I meant first of all in a kind of directing way, that it forces you backwards to think about what is portrayed.
Madeleine Strindberg: That is exactly one of the reasons for the transformation of the soldiers to teddy bears, the use of the silver and the fairy lights and all the other idiosyncracies of the work. They are all devices for simultaneous seduction and repulsion, to attract and to push people back at the same time. I think all my work is a kind of give and take between what you know, images you have previously seen but not really seen, and here they are again but transformed in their adulterated way. Made beautiful, really beautiful, while simultaneously horrific. When you look at the faces they kind of push you right off and then you look at the tank behind with its silver sugar icing, delectable and edible at the same time.
Mel Gooding: Yes, that’s what I meant by the other thing – it’s alienating in terms of the way in which it works but it’s also alienating in the other sense, it alienates you from the subject matter. Which is a different kind of alienation that makes you feel that what you’re looking at actually is a comic but horrible, horrid.
Barry Barker: But when you look at look at painting like this one – it’s really cuddly, isn’t it, you’ve got the teddy bears and you’ve got that arm over this silver gunship, he’s cuddling it, he’s taking it to bed. He’s either smoking a cigarette or sucking his thumb and he’s got his cuddly gunship and he’s going to go to bed with his teddy bear. This is a very interesting painting and the reason I wanted to mention it is that these paintings are not just ‘about war’. If you look at individual ones they start to deepen and there’s as much content in that painting as with many great paintings.
Mel Gooding: One of the things about the paintings is that I find interesting is that they intrigue and puzzle and disturb but they are also funny, there’s a comic-book element to them, those kind of crude graphic devices that you use . . .You have to work with the paintings yourself and you can find many different ways to respond to them. What they certainly don’t do is provide you with an answer. The brave thing about this body of work is just how far it refrains from making a direct statement. Not that we shouldn’t make direct statements but I think art has to do more than that, it has to make possible a multiplicity of readings. These are not paintings that have designs on you in a very deliberate way – I never feel Madeleine Strindberg is saying something, it is almost like she’s presenting you with this extraordinary complex experience and you’ve got to work that into your own way of dealing with the world as it is.
And irony is the same. There’s a lot of irony in these paintings but irony is a way of holding more than one possible truth or more than one possible kind of statement in poise, and that’s something these paintings do.
Madeleine Strindberg: Ambiguity to me is only acceptable if it comes from a very specific starting point. You can hide behind ambiguity, but ambiguity can also be an excellent tool to challenge the viewer in their preconceived ideas. I think you can lose the viewer by being giving everything away. In each painting the original image has to go through a filter, a process of manipulation and transformation before it can become a painting. Ambiguity can be very good, if it is achieved through this process.
Mel Gooding: There’s a richness of possible meanings. There are many types of ambiguity but all of them are ways in which a particular image can present us with more than one possibility of meaning at the same time. I think these particular paintings do that and there’s a terrific force – first of all when you see them you think ,‘Ah, I know what they are’, then you think, ‘No, it doesn’t quite mean that, it might mean something else.’ You keep going backwards and forwards. This ambiguity’s not just a device, it reflects the real problem of how do you express certain kinds of truth about certain kinds of reality without being seen as either obvious or crudely one-sided or whatever? These aren’t one-sided or any-sided – they’re many-sided. There’s no doubt at all, however – and that’s what the stretcher brings us back to downstairs – in the end we have to turn, confronted by this kind of work, we have to examine our moral response in some ways and question what lies behind the work, what the work reflects in the world. And there are not many artists at the moment working, in my knowledge, who actually confront us with this kind of interpretative challenge. This is a difficult subject matter. The subject matter here isn’t really Iraq, it’s everywhere. We’re right in the middle of things and these paintings address the general problem in terms of that specific moment.
TILES
'WE HAVE BROUGHT TORTURE AND MISERY IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM'
Harold Pinter,2005
INCIDENTSPlease note:
TILES all 36x36cm,gloss on canvas,
INCIDENTS all 50x50cm,gloss on canvas
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