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Interview with Michael Zahn
Michael Brennan: When I first met you in the late 80's, you were already making paintings and objects that dealt with a binary vocabulary. It seems strange to recall this, but this was before Windows was ubiquitous. Nothing was public yet, so to speak. Michael Zahn: I'd encountered some of the first Macintosh machines in school, but their practical use was limited. I learned to spec type with a ruler. I have a friend I went to kindergarten with who began work at Microsoft around '86, but he retired a few years ago, so I've clearly not done something quite right.
MB: In 1988, none of the technology that we now depend on so heavily was fully in place. I had no e-mail. My first job in New York City involved operating a telex machine. I spent hours punching holes into a ticker-tape paper strip and then fed that strip manually into the telex in order to send a short message overseas. If the holes had been miskeyed or if the strip tore while being fed I had to start over. Despite the glow from the personal computer boom, the digital revolution still seemed like an abstraction. So tell me, when and how did you first become interested in this paradigm? MZ: The time we're talking about, the late 80s, when I first began painting, was a weird time to be a young artist. The objective formalism that was emblematic of modernism, at least in New York, where it was said that 'what you see is what you see', was largely exhausted. Certain discursive practices arose in formalism's wake which suggested something like 'what you see is who you are'. As much as I admired it, I distrusted the subjective post-Pop iconicity of much of that work. Many of those approaches were motivated by generational biases of which I felt no part. I mean, I couldn't see myself working in such a way. What I did find compelling and oddly enough, given their premises, very open, were the various endgame arguments describing the death of authorship, an alleged crisis in representation, and how they were obliquely related to this myth of the 'last painting'. Those theoretical arguments were absolutely withering, but I also found them to have a severe appeal. Around the same time, I'd read some papers on robotics and artificial vision which led me to consider language and surface in a notational or provisional sense. Magazines like Mondo 2000 and Wired were appearing on newsstands with claims that a nascent digital paradigm would have deep implications.
MB: It seems like that community isn't receptive to anything without a prescribed use, like art. MZ: Well, paintings are objects, but they aren't necessarily gadgets, and so aside from the 'gee-whiz' technical aspects of certain images that are fundamentally illustrative or narrative, and which some people find captivating, I think I'd have to agree with you.
MB: I always thought that you made an important contribution in your approach from the beginning. Until fairly recently, most artists, running the gamut from Michael Jackson to Fabian Marcaccio and others, were only enamored of the fantastic morphological effects of digital technology. Everything 'digital' was about the possibilities of mutable form, whereas you've been engaged with the structural representation of information and the architecture of formats. I think that was probably only an industry-level concern at the time we'd met. MZ: That's possible. I don't know. When I was younger I was interested in the clear, matter-of-fact legibility that designers like Edward Tufte and Susan Kare brought to their work. I was looking for a similar kind of plainness in my painting. There was an extremely limited vocabulary available with which to discuss things. Some of it was ridiculous. Like I never bought the claim that computation was analogous to, you know, the discovery of fire. But it did seem at least as potentially transformative as the invention of perspective, and so almost from the beginning I began wondering how a weightless logic of zeroes and ones would affect a materialist practice like painting, which was alleged to be historically finished. With my first paintings, I organized the surfaces as binary patterns of black and white stripes that mimicked aspects of early bit-map based applications like MacPaint, and proceeded from there. For a few years, I painted serial works that were conceived as digitized monochromes, or 'paintings for robots'. Not owning a robot of my own, this was obviously a pretty monkish endeavor. But those enervating principles of reductio ad absurdum taken to the Nth degree clarified any residual values I'd found problematic, and gave a little glimpse of a place where I could act.
MB: I sometimes think that without Edward Tufte, and maybe also Alan Moore, that there would be no 'Vitamin-P' style of painting today. But you were also working in construction as a housepainter at that time. You really surprised me a month or so ago when you told me that you didn't own a computer until a just few years ago. How do the two influences, which are both so immediately apparent in your work, compliment one other? MZ: It's a manual craft, but house painting doesn't accommodate the myriad relationships that gesture has to expressive feeling, and I ruthlessly applied this approach to work in the studio. This seemed kind of natural. One of the legacies of late modernism was that things be grasped immediately, at least visually. Abolishing part-to-part relationships transformed painterly detail by articulating it as a contiguous surface, or by pushing incident to the edges of the picture plane. I accepted these principles as givens and began brushing or rolling things with successive coats nearly from the get-go. These are radically economical gestures that were an everyday part of my life, and they neatly corresponded to how I felt my paintings should look. House painting allowed me to understand materials in an expedient, no-nonsense way. It implied a relationship to detail that's more global and diffuse in its attention. Walls skimmed with seven coats of plaster or doors brushed with four coats of oil project an understated intensity that are quite refined and wholly convincing in ways that are sensed yet aren't readily apparent. These ordinary things, these surfaces, objects, and volumes, when finished in such a way, can almost appear to be dematerialized without being transcendent. I think that's a fascinating paradox. It's one that clearly resonates with the look of digital environments and with how we commonly percieve them. Since I'd already decided upon a particular syntax for the paintings, it was a short step to painting out walls or an entire room in a relative manner. There was a five-year period where I always painted the walls a cool gray, and concentrated on the absorptive or immersive environment these expanses of color created. This complicated figure-ground relationships, and established a different kind of visual field. One of my models around that time was a Citibank ATM lobby on Broadway and Walker Street, near where I had my studio. The interface has since changed alot, but the touch screens in that lobby were very graphic, and were subtly linked to their surroundings by unobtrusive shades of gray, silver, black, white, blue, and violet.
MB: I remember that lobby. It was clean like Kubrick, in striking contrast to the rest of lower Broadway. MZ: The cold luminosity of that deserted lobby late at night was awesome. It was fantastic. You could conduct a solitary transaction in this desolate public space, and then walk around the corner, conduct another transaction, and get into the worst kind of trouble imaginable. Anyhow, my studio was lit by four suspended fluorescent fixtures that made a kind of ceiling, and I began using color there in an achromatic, all-around way that wasn't bound to a frontal or purely optical experience of the work. Given my concerns, this seemed like a novel quasi-architectural intervention, yet it also looked back to a period before the dominance of the portable panel painting. I set up procedural conditions for myself where certain parameters of painting were compressed, and information about the practice was demonstrated using a number of generic or readymade structures. Addressing computation very broadly as a symbolic or iconic system related to experience in its analog form, encompassing perception, thought, and movement, seemed like an interesting path to follow. And never having had a real tech fetish or having been much of an early adopter, I think I finally got a laptop around '99, for totally pragmatic reasons. It was around the time that the first generation iMacs appeared, the ones that featured 'flavors' like tangerine and blueberry and lime.
MB: It seems like you've kept the computer at arm's length a little. How has your project evolved over the last fifteen years? MZ: I rarely use the computer in ways that it's used by artists today, but three summers ago I designed a set of four Flash animations. They featured a simple motif derived from online advertising, and were conceived for temporary exhibition in a public space in Munich. I eventually found their disembodied thinness a little unsatisfying in that, you know, there's plenty of winking and blinking stuff out there, and I don't feel especially thrilled adding to it. Sometimes I'm happy that other people do. But the phenomenological quandary raised by an experience mediated by zeroes and ones, of how language is apprehended as material and encoded in the body, are my primary concerns. I'm translating some of the generalized aspects of a virtual binary system into actual painterly terms, and giving a specific thickness and weight to this representational order that's utterly abstract and dematerialized. Up until about '94 or '95 my work was fairly intransitive. I wasn't overly concerned with objects or images per se. What did concern me was establishing a literal post-linguistic substrate as a ground upon which I could build. It wasn't until a little later that the personal computer and the desktop metaphor itself entered the picture, so to speak, as a surface that piqued my interest. Between '96 and '01, when the dot-com boom was underway and the Internet was becoming more and more of a generic commercial space, I'd painted versions of folders, windows, menus, progress bars, and other features of different applications that I considered physical 'hard copies' of those digital things. I'd used a CAD program called SolidWorks to fabricate a trash can sculpture from a digital file. Using software as a postindustrial readymade to quickly mill a three-dimensional representation of that desktop icon held an enormous appeal for me. Making these various things was like doing a kind of pre-emptive archaeology, and this resonated with a concept from Walter Benjamin's Arcades project, in that he'd thought of urban industrial objects as fossils. Well, here was a case where this nearly appeared to be so. Developments were happening so quickly in the culture-- processor speeds were becoming faster, hardware and software upgrades were constant, more bandwidth was available-- that it seemed I'd have plenty of material to consider for the foreseeable future as components were developed and discarded. The work reflected this up to a certain point. Alot of desktop iconography, which now includes the animated visual junk that comprises e-mail pages, pop-ups, or online banners, superficially resembles hard-edge painting, monochrome painting, or other kinds of abstract painting. It isn't completely based on explicit figuration in the way that other imagery in the world usually is. There are inherent contradictions here, beginning with the assertion that abstract painting was dead, or that modernity was finished, or that abstraction and representation were somehow suddenly congruous, which are related to how we navigate the common consensual space of, say, the desktop. These contradictions intrigue me and sustain my focus. Looking at the iconography in the way I do frees me from having to make some of the arbitrary compositional decisions that have always bedeviled abstract painters in particular. It opens the paintings up to the space around them, in that the multiple-panel works are distributed in an ad-hoc, post-modular kind of way. It's an approach that disregards the confines of a single frame-- and I mean 'frame' in a very broad sense-- since that was how things really felt during the dot-com boom, and in a certain sense obviously still do. I find the complex relationships that arise between things are usually far, far more interesting than simple entities in and of themselves. There's more room made for response, invention, and interpretation, and that's where my work is situated at the moment.
MB: You've transformed desktop iconography to suit your own ends. It's clearly not just a literal lifting of images. You've reconfigured a standardized language much like Roy Lichtenstein once manipulated comics. Your paintings may strike some as stern at first, but they're oddly sensual and quite subtle. They're rigorous, but not static. How tweaked or how generic is the work? What's your general approach to surface and color? MZ: My work is based on digitized structures that are built upon a foundation of simulated uniformity. The icon is the cornerstone of that generalized totality. It's an anchoring device based on twin notions of resemblance and use, and is a unit of support within very large symbolic systems. I extrapolated on its functionality when I retained its resemblance in a very real sense, by making the icon into an indexical object, but I discarded its quotidian use. The paintings up until about '03 were kind of mute, or autistic, in that they referred to the one-dimensional, rule-based parameters of a program. For me, hard-edge painting is like a default setting. Some things look a certain way. My paintings happen to be hard-edge. There are relationships there that I needn't belabor. But my paintings have very reserved tactile qualities that have nothing to do with a graphic image, even if the apprehension is immediate. I don't work from drawings. Multiple panels and the spaces between them serve to break up the totality of the image and introduce an active, controlled tension. I adjust shapes and volumes within the work, and the internal divisions are derived from intuitive responses. I respond to the limits of my reach. It's just me and a straight edge and a roll of tape. I'm aware of my movements in front of the painting, and I want the finished work to retain a semblance of this motion and project it back at the viewer, even if the accreted gestures involved in the physical articulation of its surface are internalized. There are doubly performative aspects to the paintings. There are the aspects of their making, which I've just described. There are also other internalized movements, which are related to the directions that the hand and the eye follow when engaging a digital interface, and which are encoded in the pictorial mechanics of the paintings, and which they themselves represent. In a certain sense, the paintings become another kind of interface. Color intensifies this compounded sense of movement, as it's declarative, and commands its specific place. But color is tricky. Our contemporary sense of color is so determined by commercial objectification that I find it's nearly impossible to talk about it without sounding like a huckster. Fairly recently I made a group of ten paintings that were based on pop-ups and banners, the most banal kind of stupid looking e-junk. I'd mixed alot of sophisticated color for that group but found I had a difficult time using it in ways that weren't purely formal. I'd made earlier paintings derived from digital palettes, where each one was a compendium of colors, that easily avoided that problem. Some of the paintings derived from online advertising did too, but some did not.
MB: What led to the black paintings that you exhibited in Salzburg in 2005? How did you get from doing multi-panel color paintings to those, exactly? MZ: The black paintings came directly out of the vague unease I had with using color in what I'd perceived was a limited formal way. That last group of paintings I'd made on plexiglas supports were all single-panel paintings. I'd consolidated things from the multiple-panel works and integrated the formats. A few of them were very good, compact and dense with information. Each color carried a range of association that, when combined with other hues, really started to buzz with a low-level frequency. The paintings contained a kind of free-floating hyperlink complexity which shied away from any verbal content, and the entire process involved with their making embodied an experience that was the closest I've come to apprehending color as a language with its own expressive potential and obdurate irreducibility. I then spent about a year making works on paper that outlined a different set of possibilities. They were loosely based on proto-digital environments that preceded widespread adoption of the desktop metaphor, and they anticipated the use of scale and color relationships that are the basis of my current paintings. The palette of the black paintings calls to mind the command line or DOS systems of the early '80s. They were characterized by a deliberately superficial figuration of asymmetrical grids, broken linear channels, and clustered pictographs rendered in a luminous green. The color I used in these paintings was highly symbolic and intensely nostalgic. It wasn't formal at all. Actually, it was barely anything. At the absolute minimum, there was value contrast. The color in each painting was very finely tuned, as the blacks and greens were each subtly different from one another. There was a narrow stripe of pure carbon black at the bottom of each canvas. That was about it. But regardless of how reductive the paintings were, there were any number of associations that would accrue to these works because of the relatively simple way color was used. The majority of those associations came from outside the frame. The black paintings shown in Salzburg, of which there were nine, along with the related works in the exhibition, were together conceived as a meditation on the recent technological past.
MB: What about the work which features the cover art from the New Order album Power, Corruption and Lies? It's such a powerful image, and is so emblematic for our tiny non-generation. MZ: The work you mention was a pixelated image of the New Order album cover. The cover's designer, Peter Saville, appropriated the flower painting on its cover from Henri Fantin-Latour. Power, Corruption, and Lies was released in the early '80s on vinyl, and one of its singles, 'Blue Monday', is one of the biggest selling 12-inch singles ever, but the album was also one of the very first CDs I remember seeing. Anyhow, that image had been hanging around my studio for a few years and found its way into the group early on as I began working on the first two black paintings. It strongly influenced how I thought about the works as a relational whole, which had an additive, cumulative effect based on the tripartite Peircean structure of symbol, icon, and index. The individual black paintings were autonomous yet clearly related to one another by their color and by their shape. They were countered by the monumental Desktop, a large violet wall painting hung with a number of small panels, in which a pictorial metaphor formatted the qualities of the graphical user interface. The pixelated floral image was titled Alias. It floated on a saturated aqua background and represented the fragment of a second desktop. As such, it casually referred to larger networked systems. The sculpture that was placed near it, Order, which was a group of three brown 'virtual' boxes made of painted MDF, were considered as a product of said systems. By using the floral image as an alias, I temporally compressed the entire group of works in a concise way-- it served to recall a period of about twenty years, beginning in 1982, before digitalization was widespread, until about 2002, by which time the dot-com bubble had burst, and the '80s themselves were becoming historicized. I imagined Alias evoking the screen of an iMac running OS 8 in the late '90s or so. But you mentioned the power of Saville's image. Seeing that cover when I did, I'll never forget how unusual the album seemed. It was unique. Of course, the music it contained was terrific. There was a cool, composed seamlessness to the entire package that was really impressive. It exuded a natural kind of dignity that was controlled, but not uptight. In retrospect, the album was an absolutely perfect audiovisual picture of grief. It's a panegyric written not just to the passing of Joy Division, but to an entire tradition of analog musicianship and recording. It's a stunningly beautiful document.
MB: Tell me about the Stickies paintings. They have a very different feeling than the relatively severe black paintings before them. MZ: One of the things we haven't mentioned yet is the larger role of memory in this contemporary context. It sometimes seems nostalgia is the only form of memory this culture will tolerate. My black paintings and the related works reflected that to a degree. Modernism had allegedly shown us what paintings are, and the black near-monochromes of Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella are exemplary works in that regard. One of the green figures I used in a few of my black paintings was an asterisk, and I thought those works could be seen as mordant footnotes to heroic avant-garde painting, and also to the postmodern endgame theorizing that informed some of the 'last painting' parodies of the '80s. But a single painting, Stellar, presented a string of asterisks that comprised a clustered generic figure which resembles a password. It suggested a cryptic identity or a surrogate signature. There was a habitual task-based quality to it that I found interesting. Anyhow, the black paintings left me looking around for another simple device like the everyday figure of the password. I'd previously made some paintings based on Apple's Stickies application, but had only used them to flesh out the larger Desktop wall paintings. The application is like an e-version of the Post-It note, which is such a fantastic cliche highlighting the harried, absent-minded obsessiveness of which we're all a bit guilty to one degree or another. 'Don't forget to remember to not forget to pick up the whatever, meet so-and-so whenever, wherever', that kind of thing. These dumb yellow bits of nothing have a funny relationship to contemporary memory and social interaction. They're a little anticipatory, like tiny slivers of the only future we can sometimes seem to imagine, which is, you know, the day after tomorrow or something. But the pervasiveness of digital technology is changing those relationships that we have to even the most trivial kind of memory. Mobile PDAs like the Blackberry are usurping the place of small reminders like the handwritten note. I suppose this is thought of as being efficient somehow, but I've personally lost my address book at least twice now when my rig crashed. Last summer I almost got into a fist-fight at the T-Mobile store when the sales rep suggested that he wouldn't be able to transfer the numbers in my old cellphone to a new one simply because the old one was, in his words, obsolete. I'd had the old phone for about a year, which I guess is the standard life for a cellphone, or for its battery. I'd suggest that this in itself represents another small victory for pencil and paper. Not that I'd want to have to have a daily struggle with the telex machine you mentioned before. But it's only been very recently where suggestions have arisen that digital technology, in the form of networking sites like MySpace, for example, is having profound effects on neurological structures, social behavior, and cultural norms. Today, digital phenomena seem as natural as dawn and dusk, but you and I are members of the last generation living in the industrialized world who are able to recall things as they existed before computation became widespread. I don't know if this is important or not, but I'd at least like to imagine you and I aren't going the way of the Neanderthals just because my nephew wants a new iPhone or something.
MB: Maybe 'Neanderthal' won't seem like such an epithet in another generation or two. MZ: Who knows? I mean, I don't know.
MB: Your recent large black and white paintings seem like a grand convergence to me. They would work perfectly alongside the first binary work I saw in your old studio on lower Broadway. Are they a kind of summation? MZ: A convergence is possible. I'm not sure yet. I hope I'm not summing up. I'm much more concerned now with how things feel rather than how they look. Digital technology is pervasive. Screens are becoming smaller and more mobile, and it seems that keystroke commands and shorthand graphic notations like emoticons, which now are still pretty primitive, will begin to supplant intricate pictorial metaphors slowly but surely. It seems we're coming full circle in a way, back to a simplified command line kind of logic that's easier to use than its early predecessors. GUIs based on the desktop metaphor might be facing the first intimations of their obsolescence. Language itself will probably undergo profound changes. It already has, to a degree. I hope to not live to see the day when we all communicate exclusively in abbreviated acronyms, LOL. But regardless, I do know the new work currently in the studio is already very different. They're the most painterly works I've made. I've left alot of the explicit reference behind, streamlined my vocabulary, and bumped up the scale dramatically. I'm using color in a direct way that seems familiar but very fresh. Some of the paintings are ten or twelve feet on a side, and they tend to activate space rather than refer to it, as some of my earlier works on panels did. They feel pretty good so far. They have a nice touch. The hard edge is not read as style. The sense of volume and movement is strong. The level of resolution is very high. All in all, it's an exciting moment.
MB: And what do you have in mind for the MINUS SPACE project? MZ: The MINUS SPACE project is a bit of a departure in that it's loosely based on my perception of color, texture, and detail in different gaming environments, and how objects in that kind of immersive symbolic space are imbued with a strangely emotional resonance that is both convincing and compelling. There are shifting levels of very visceral reality and densely immaterial representation within a game which exist independently of scripted narratives, and are deeply moving and incredibly complex. I'm hoping to recreate some of that emotional complexity with this project for Rossana and Matthew. We'll see how it all looks. It should be fun.
Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn painter who writes on art. This interview was published on the occasion of Michael Zahn's exhibition "This, That, and the Other" at MINUS SPACE project space, April 2007. |
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