Rowley Kennerk Gallery
MOLLY ZUCKERMAN-HARTUNG INTERVIEW Rowley Kennerk: How would you consider "tradition" and "irreverence" in relation to your practice? The exhibition title, "She-male Guitar Solo," must be related to this? Molly Zuckerman-Hartung: This is something i think about a lot. I grew up on the west coast in a very permissive atmosphere. my mom was something of a hippy, i went to a hippy college, i was involved in a punk/indie community for 10 plus years. I think by the time I moved to Chicago I was actually longing for a sense of tradition. The idea of a lineage. I read Derrida before I read Plato, so even notions of linearity and one-way-ness in history are somewhat malleable to me. A way to contextualize myself and my actions. I was searching for language. This is a big part of the appeal of painting to me. I find the excess weight of a long tradition exhilarating. I think it has something to do with a feeling of grief about the "end of history" and the flatlands of future-gazing in late capitalism. Looking backward gives weight to language that can begin to seem as though it were invented yesterday. Of course it is a see-saw, and the reference can get too strong all of a sudden. RK: Why are there no titles for the individual works? MZ: Words feel too laden/leaden. RK: Many contemporary painters rely on a singular and immediately identifiable style. You avoid this. Why? MZ: Style is the way you hold your cigarette or pronounce your r's. Style emerges out of a myriad of decisions rather like an odor emanating from a pile of clothing. What you refer to as style seems to me more like branding... more related to identity. RK: Do you categorize your paintings into different bodies of work? MZ: First, singular and iconic - a single move or event, like a monosyllabic utterance - Ow! Ahhh. Second, multiple parts in relation. these are hybrid and interchangeable... sometimes the multiplicity becomes excessive, chaotic. I call these overloaded painting suitcase paintings. I don't think they are showable or salvageable, but they help the rest of the practice. Third, portraiture or "the gaze" looking toward viewer and away, or outward and inward simultaneously. Fourth, The hardest category to describe, harder to make. i think of dark matter, negation, absorption. the dream or maybe the nightmare of all the other paintings. maybe i haven't made this type of painting yet but i'd like to... RK: Any dead painters you care to mention? MZ: Hans Hartung for a language of instantaneous gesture - like a lightning bolt or a signature or a punch. Paul Klee, Bonnard and Vuillard, for an almost stifling, cloistered interior/domestic space (and the relationship between that and subjectivity) also, with Bonnard and Vuillard the creation of this padded wall/ secret garden feeling during the height of the industrial revolution. In a way I think work like this allows one to experience the shock of modernity more completely, because the contrast is so great. Matisse for everything but specifically his depiction of reverie, daydreaming. Fautrier as a cleanser of coyness. Henry James, not a painter, but he is dead. Using consciousness as a structure.
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