Clear View, Session 1: R.H. Quaytman
Antoine Wiertz, Hunger, Madness and Crime, 1853
by Francesco Tenaglia
As I descend the stairs that lead me out of the imposing ex-distillery – today one of the most mint art venues in the Euroland: WIELS – and cut through the de rigueur Brussels winter chill, it becomes clear: the first person I want to talk to for this series which takes one single picture as its starting point is R.H. Quaytman. The artist whose exhibition I had just seen – Modern Subjects, Chapter Zero (2021) – was born in Boston; hired by the PS1 Museum in 1987, she organised the first US solo exhibition of the pioneering Swedish abstract artist Hilma af Klint; she has also briefly engaged in art dealing, founding the short-lived Orchard Gallery in New York with other artists, filmmakers, and curators in 2005. (In all honesty, the brainy programme made it clear that ideas rather than sell-outs were the main focus driving the operation).
From 2001, R.H. Quaytman began to organise her exhibitions in thematically homogeneous numbered “chapters” – the one I had just saw, in an unexpected reset, was number zero – which respond to and spring from an in-depth research into the sites where Quaytman will present the group of paintings. The Brussels chapter is dedicated to the Belgian Romantic artist, Antoine Wiertz (22 February 1806 – 18 June1865), whose mastodontic canvases portraying mythological, philosophical and often didactic themes denouncing social injustices can still be seen free of charge in his studio-museum, by the conditions the artist agreed with the city before his death. There I’m rushing after my visit to WIELS, and there I find all the subjects in Quaytman’s works I saw at the WIELS: they are reworked in her now-familiar technique of using photo-based silkscreens applied to gessoed plywood, and layering them with painting. The panels are in modular, nesting sizes corresponding to the dimensions of the golden section. In Wiertz Museum is also Hunger, Madness and Crime (1853), the creepy painting that R.H. Quaytman decides will be the starting point for our zoom call.
Francesco Tenaglia
The image you suggested to kick-start the conversation is Hunger, Madness and Crime, which Antoine Wiertz realized in 1853 and is the very morbid, if I may say that, depiction of a mother…
R.H. Quaytman
Yes. Eating her own baby. I think Wiertz meant for her to look very beautiful in a way. Look at her big smile with her white teeth. It’s like Cover Girl or Britney Spears. It was a real shock-a-roo of a painting. You don’t normally encounter in museums anymore paintings of that kind of horror and gruesomeness, although what it depicts was taken straight from the newspapers…What I really loved about his late paintings, which are the ones I focused on for the exhibition at WIELS, is that they were concerned with contemporary problems that sadly are still contemporary or ‘modern subjects’. He didn’t shy away from graphically depicting the horrors of war, rape, hunger, plagues and madness. He stated that when these problems were eradicated he would stop painting them.
This painting was made in order to raise funds for a daycare centre for working mothers. Unfortunately, the political motivations for many of these paintings is not highlighted or explained in the museum, like the triptych graphically showing what the condemned man feels as his head is cut from his body. He made this work in protest of capital punishment which he vigorously opposed. Female self-defence was another topic – he painted a woman blowing out the brains of her attacker. All these subjects subsequently went into cinema but were evacuated from painting.
Tenaglia
I visited the museum after your exhibition and, wow, it was just overwhelming.
Quaytman
I think the museum is like a panorama of painting genres; you go there and experience western history through painting. From ancient Greece to Christianity to modernity and finally sci-fi. Maybe what he had in mind were those big fairs, something like the Crystal Palace. Maybe he was thinking of an all round sensory experience, like panoramas of his time or like virtual reality.
Tenaglia
Like a super-salon. He participated in the Paris Salon of 1839, didn’t he?
Quaytman
Yes. Well, that was the big problem: he was ignored or made fun of, especially for his painting The Greeks and the Trojans Fighting over the Body of Patroclus (c. 1836), a gigantic painting measuring 395 x 703 centimetres.
Antoine Wiertz, The Greeks and the Trojans Fighting over the Body of Patroclus, c. 1836
Tenaglia
I think it’s bigger than most of the flats I’ve lived in.
Quaytman
It’s also important to point out that he took a vow of poverty his whole life and lived extremely modestly. It may look as if he took the government for a ride with this atelier museum idea but, in fact, it was a fair deal. His only source of income were portrait paintings he would make for people, however he refused to sign these. He said he made them for the soup. He was strongly opposed to mixing art and fiscal ambition.
Tenaglia
The layout of the artwork at the museum is so dense; however, you took a very different path for the presentation at WIELS.
Quaytman
When you enter the large exhibition space on the third floor of WIELS, you only see the edge of one long wall bisecting the space in two. No paintings are visible from the entrance. You are given a choice, left or right. I’ve always thought about how a painting is often experienced as something that happens in the periphery of the field of vision. There’s a lateral legibility that I’m interested in, and I’ve experimented with different ways try to reinforce it, to invite viewers to walk around within the show.
Like a promenade or a panorama, Wiertz, had placed many of the painting in modern subjects behind walls equipped with peepholes. He liked tricks like this and also it prevented children from experiencing some of the horrors they depict. I referenced this history by making four large circular openings in the wall at both sides on either end. These circle shaped niches are like large peep holes that do obscure large portions of the paintings. I also had some concern about frightening children with some of these paintings. But I had a wonderful experience with a group of children that meet every day at WIELS after school. They have a podcast on Spotify in which they discuss exhibitions at the museum. They interviewed me for that and asked quite pointed questions about why on earth I would choose to paint such horrible things. I tried to explain it is a little like saying “Boo!” I don’t mean to horrify too much, only enough to affect you the way optical patterns can affect your vision. Anyway, I love that interview.
Tenaglia
That must have been a tough gig.
Quaytman
It was. Your questions are a walk in the park in comparison.
Tenaglia
Another thing that we should address is the way you thought about the chapter system that you started to use years ago.
Quaytman
It was originally, and still continues to be, the primary method I use to enforce continuity over time. It’s an attempt to gain some agency in the face of the unpredictable whims of the art world with its schedules and amnesia. I started the chapters when I was forty. I had already been painting for 20 years and I was doing more and more research-based things. I consider that all the chapters, ending with The Sun Does Not Move, Chapter 35, as one volume so to speak. Then 2020 hit and everything changed. This is why this Wiertz chapter is also Chapter 0. Now the question is: What number follows zero? I’m thinking about that now – I mean what comes after. I think it’ll be a decimal, like a fraction. The numbers will contract as in Zeno’s paradox. It could go forever. It can’t be chapter one again. It would have to be Chapter 0.1 or 0.618. Also, I’m trying to make a book of the last ten chapters because I made that for the first twenty chapters in a book called Spine.
Tenaglia
Has your relationship with the chapter method changed since you started using it?
Quaytman
Definitely. The way I paint has changed slowly over the years. I think I’ve become much more interested and engaged with how to go about painting over or on top of photographs that have been silkscreened onto the panel. I like to paint on photographs because I feel like we’re in the prison of photography now. One of the only powerful things about painting now is to stand in opposition to photography. I also use optical patterns on the paintings because they really screw with digital cameras, and are hard to capture. If you take a picture of those paintings with your phone, it will have a hard time focusing for a second. You’ll always get a moiré. I love moiré. Anyway, I also think that the art historical aspect of the subject matter in the chapters was a surprise. I didn’t set out to do all this in-depth work on various art historical issues programmatically; it arose out and was connected of the localities the painting were made first to be seen. The highlight of that research was when I figured out that Martin Luther was behind the Angelus Novus [a reference to a discovery made while working on חקק, Chapter 29 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art]. I’d say that discovery was the shining moment for my career thus far. I think of subject matter like this: art history is an attempt to predict the past that the future will come from.
Tenaglia
It’s interesting that you introduced the Angelus Novus project after talking about jamming mobile phone cameras via patterns: Paul Klee’s drawing was beloved by Walter Benjamin, who discussed the relationship between the beaux arts and industrial arts.
Quaytman
Yes, indeed. The other interesting thing is that Benjamin wrote extensively about Wiertz. I didn’t realise that when I began the project about him. But then I looked into it because there was so little serious writing on this work. The only writer I could find that took him seriously was Benjamin. He was interested in how he predicted the future correctly through his writing and work on photography.
Tenaglia
In a piece for Artforum (September 2011), Paul Galvez said you revisit “institutional critique’s antivisual stratagems through its own bête noire, painting.” Do you subscribe to this point of view?
Quaytman
Back then, that was the case. There was a moment, when I was beginning my career, when painting was considered the reactionary move. One was seen as trying to move things backwards in time by painting and to be pretending what was happening with the photograph and the digital wasn’t. This produced a pressure on painting to figure out ways to partake in the present that other art forms seemed engaged with.
Tenaglia
Your series of works – or chapters – often anchor themselves to an artist or to aspects of an artist’s work. What interests you about this method of procedure and how do you navigate from one set of references to another?
Quaytman
It probably comes from institutional critique’s emphasis on being able to understand and state clearly what the art work is actually trying to do. In attempting to figure out what I might want to do with painting, I started to simply copy things from art historical sources that interested and moved me – as a way to find a ground. I think I was looking for “hints” on how to proceed.
I started with the Polish artist Katarzyna Kobro – first I rebuilt one of her sculptures and then I photographed it. That gave me about five years of thinking and work. Through thinking about her work I began to integrate geometry in my overall structure. The idea of using the golden section and using nesting sizes for my panels came from her, so that the square shapes fit in rectangles and so on. This enabled me to put different kinds of paintings together, side by side, in a way that generated cohesion, because you can sense the sort of internal geometry there. After that, it would depend on the site visits I made before a show. For example, at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, there were squares everywhere: rooms, architecture and a lot of the art was square. I made squares in that. I photographed a lot of their collection, and then the process of silk-screening I employ altered the photographs. I photographed a grey painting by Gerhard Richter in their collection, then printed it in RedGreenBlue, so it doesn’t look grey at all and looks more like an atmosphere, you know? These references open the paintings up to wider interpretations.
Tenaglia
What are you working on right now?
Quaytman
I’m trying to work on this book. I’m printing out all the paintings I’ve done since Chapter 21 which makes for quite a pile of paper. I spend my days sitting and going through all these paintings; I look at them and make different categories: abstract paintings, paintings of other artworks, knitting patterns and optical paintings. I’m looking at the categories I tend to work with. I’m also beginning to paint again after spending almost two years with Wiertz. Maybe it’s time to interpret my art history and retreat back into my studio for a bit…
About the Interviewee
R.H. Quaytman (b. 1961, Boston) lives and works in Guilford, CT and New York. Quaytman studied at Bard College and at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris, and received the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in 2001. In 2015, Quaytman was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize with Michael Krebber. Since 2006, Quaytman has taught at Bard College, in addition to lecturing at Princeton University, Cooper Union, Columbia University, and the Yale University School of Art. In 2005, she co-founded Orchard, a cooperatively-run exhibition and event space that concluded its three-year run on the Lower East Side in 2008. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Insititute of Chicago, the Pinault Collection, the Tate Modern, the Museo Reina Sofia, the V–A–C Foundation, Fondazione Memmo, the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, among others. Quaytman’s work was featured in documenta 14 (2017), the 54th Venice Biennale and the 2010 Whitney Biennial, and solo shows dedicated to her work have taken place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2018), Secession, Vienna (2017), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016), Miguel Abreu Gallery (2008, 2015), Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2015), Renaissance Society, Chicago (2013), the Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2012), Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels (2012, 2014), the Kunsthalle Basel (2011), Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne (2011), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2010), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2009).
About the Interviewer
Francesco Tenaglia is a writer, curator and professor that lives and works in Berlin and Milan.
