Rail: Right. But yeah, it seems to be this search for forcing yourself to be totally present within the act of painting, and the search for what artifice or prompt lets you set the stage for that, and once its built, you have to be totally in it, undistracted, to find the event. You don\u2019t give yourself a lot of time to solve the new problem.<\/p>\n
Madani: I love the work that feels as in flux in front of everybody else as it does in front of me. It still has that sense of potentiality when someone else is in front of it.<\/p>\n
Rail: Yes. I feel like that gives language to one of the things that it takes some time to realize as a painter. If a painting feels too concluded or contrived\u2014if it feels like at a certain point it\u2019s just sort of filling in the blanks\u2014you end up with something that is dead on arrival, or decorative. A painting needs to have that sense that it could have gone a number of different ways, and it\u2019s best when it still feels like it can.<\/p>\n
Madani: Works which achieve or aim for a certain kind of resolution can feel closed and lack mystery\u2014you look at them from the outside.<\/p>\n
Rail: Well, as a viewer, when I\u2019m not painting, I similarly enjoy when you can see the painter\u2019s attention. There are some painters that I will see at the Met that just can\u2019t be bothered to finish the bottom of the painting on some of those big history paintings. And for some of those big, twelve-foot-tall paintings, you can see the artist go \u201cUgh, that\u2019s way down there,\u201d or \u201cI don\u2019t want to get back up on the ladder again.\u201d And it\u2019s the eye thinking and at work with a physical body that is always finding its limits.<\/p>\n
Madani: This reminds me of my enjoyment at seeing Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s big commissions that were never finished. It seems he only had the interest to go as far as he did; the rest didn\u2019t matter for him. He couldn\u2019t be bothered \u201cfilling in,\u201d as you say, those half-finished works, which also conditioned our eye to further modernism. You know, I think that\u2019s where I disagreed also with Deleuze\u2019s suggestion that Michelangelo is the beginning of modern painters, because da Vinci simply not finishing the commissions suggests as much autonomy of choice.<\/p>\n
Rail: So true. That\u2019s so true. And that\u2019s Henry James: art as a vehicle for rendering consciousness, which is unpresentable. We convey what it is that we were trying to figure out, and equally what doesn\u2019t matter. At the last big Kippenberger show at Skarstedt Gallery, you could see all of these textures from paintings underneath the paintings. You could see like a tree in texture or the beginning of a representational shape, and it has nothing to do with the final painting, but he wouldn\u2019t sand those early decisions down. Every painting reminds you of all of its forking paths. But again, that\u2019s the erotics or poetics that painting can create. There\u2019s the famous Donna Haraway thing that humor is always serious, and Lauren Berlant talking about how comedy is a way of kind of revealing who\u2019s in, who\u2019s out, and all those things. And it\u2019s an erotics of opposition, of finding the boundary line\u2014finding what can and can\u2019t be transgressed.<\/p>\n
I feel like you use painting in a similar way, and it\u2019s also in how you use humor, whether it\u2019s the crying monuments or the Shit Mom, or working through subjects of opposition towards a kind of sympathy. Is there something oppositional that you\u2019re working against within painting right now? Going back to Bacon hating Hockney for what Hockney represented\u2014is there a type of painting or subject that you see yourself working against?<\/p>\n
Madani: So many things: pushing against convention, taste, trends, misogyny, rigid self-definitions, cancel culture, depression, certainty. I don\u2019t know if this answers any of your questions, but I\u2019ve been reading Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and the book has a great foreword by Adam Phillips. The very first page of his foreword talks about Barthes\u2019s idea of becoming a personality when you write an autobiography, and the possibility of shifting that personality\u2014the permission that is given for redefining it over and over.<\/p>\n
Rail: Well, since you brought up Adam Phillips, it\u2019s also that heterodoxy that you allow yourself in your work. It makes me think of some of the psychoanalysis that reconsiders Sigmund Freud. As opposed to thinking of things as phases, stages, phobias, and types, which are very fixed structural things, you have someone like Melanie Klein talking about how the ego takes positions against different objects, so it\u2019s like we can kind of adopt the positionality of a paranoid in this object, but then cast that position aside when confronting a different topic.<\/p>\n
Madani: By the way, I have to admit: no one has described Melanie Klein versus Freud as distinctly different positions this well to me. [Laughter] She\u2019s probably closer to Arthur Schopenhauer in terms of construction of the subject\/object relationship. He had a profound effect on my relationship to painting in my twenties.<\/p>\n
Rail: How did that take form within the paintings? That\u2019s so interesting. Maybe that\u2019s what I\u2019m picking up on as a comment on painting as a position of looking.<\/p>\n
Madani: I was a student, but it expanded my sense of how a painting can operate, in terms of both one\u2019s intentions making it and an audience experiencing it.<\/p>\n
Rail: Along with opposition, I wonder if there are rules you have for yourself as a painter.<\/p>\n
Madani: Yeah, the painting has to be alive. It has to excite me. Dead paintings are okay, too\u2014they could still be a step toward something.<\/p>\n
Rail: Could you describe a dead painting?<\/p>\n
Madani: Yeah, the very first \u201cShit\u201d paintings. They were all dead. But they were promising something that I\u2019m getting closer to. They might not seem that way, but they were so shy. I mean, the very first one is actually before San Antonio, and this guy was sitting on a chair, and he\u2019s opening up his belly button and it\u2019s an inverse anus, and this piece of poo is coming out of his belly button, and it\u2019s not even brown. I was so shy to paint it. It\u2019s the same color as the figure. It\u2019s barely a poo, you know, but it was exciting because it\u2019s a stepping stone.<\/p>\n
Rail: I like how all of your characters go through these scenarios of self too. They\u2019re never one-dimensional. They\u2019ll go from expressing boredom and pacing around to then experiencing these violent episodes, and then feeling some kind of shame or shyness again. They often get into repetitive cycles. There\u2019s an elasticity that you\u2019re also interested in, or a scenario of self that I think is unfortunately kind of rare. There seems to be more of an interest in a singular idea of self in a lot of the work being made right now.<\/p>\n
Madani: A kind of conservatism comes in when you want to adamantly defend yourself or your position in society. Many artists are wanting to do work that is about, let\u2019s say, empathy or identity or elevating the social position of a group that they represent. With that comes the fear of taking a wrong step\u2014the burden of sincerity. All this takes away from the state of mind that can play without gravity.<\/p>\n
Rail: I like that. \u201cPlaying without gravity.\u201d I think that\u2019s one of our current regimes of truth, to reference Michel Foucault: looking for good and bad, or replacing ambivalence and irony and difficulty and complexity with confessionals. I feel like it\u2019s important to try to impart an awareness that events shape us, context shapes us, crowds shape us, our environment shapes us, and the desire to look for things that are inherently good or inherently bad is too easy. It\u2019s looking to offload the challenge of sitting with all of the issues we are facing. The art world in some ways has arrived back at an almost Hays Code-era Hollywood.<\/p>\n
Madani: This is interesting, because why this is happening is because of the psychological state of the world: apprehension. There is, as you say, a reason for things, right? And the need for a simplified set of facts is because of the sense of bombardment or the risk of getting it wrong. So there is no avant-garde; we don\u2019t have an appetite, or an appetite to risk it. We are in the rerun section. We want to know what we\u2019re going to see. We don\u2019t want any surprises. Let\u2019s watch episodes of Friends over and over and over because we\u2019re afraid.<\/p>\n
And I\u2019m much more interested to see why, and then what? It\u2019s always good to check in and see what is motivating you toward an action. It\u2019s a good place to start.<\/p>\n
Rail: This is the tricky thing. Pierre Bourdieu referred to what we would call the avant-garde as \u201cbourgeois art,\u201d because the majority of people oftentimes won\u2019t have the time for complexity, abstraction, poetics. It\u2019s like the art that reaches the masses is Netflix. It is the mural. It is the meme, the quick and legible and compressed thing.<\/p>\n
Madani: That mural look is now all over the art world. Go to a community center and see the kind of paintings that a person who wants to start painting paints, and then go to Frieze New York: you could take some photos, and nobody would know the difference.<\/p>\n
Rail: Yes, and I think this draws the public out of the public and into the private institution, which tries to perform as a new kind of public space. Museums and institutions have shifted to a role of mimicking and reflecting our desires and utopias back to us, and with it the tolerable forms of critique that we are allowed to engage in. The institution is always alluring because it\u2019s always promising that it can adapt to what we dream it to be. There\u2019s some connection to AI and language models with that, of returning our language and our dreams and our images back to us, but now with the mystifying power of the empire condoning it. There\u2019s something always sadistic to mimicry. Its guise takes the form of joke, but there\u2019s violence just behind it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rail: Right. But yeah, it seems to be this search for forcing yourself to be totally present within…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335310,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-335309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}