Robert Bordo - Alexander and Bonin

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Robert Bordo in Conversation with Cameron Martin Brooklyn, New York, December 2012 CM: As much as I see these new paintings as a departure for you, I don’t think that imagery or representation is an entirely new phenomenon in your work. I have never thought of you as an exclusively abstract painter. For example, you have certainly had a relationship to landscape for quite some time, and there has regularly been a kind of push-and-pull between figuration and abstraction. Maybe with this new work, you have embraced representation slightly more explicitly, but it’s not entirely novel. RB: The previous paintings were much more measured in relation to what and how representational meaning appeared in the work—although with the “postcard paintings” I did in the early 2000s there was a specific representational format that referred to landscape and memory. For the past ten or fifteen years, my paintings have been a hybrid of abstraction and representation. They’ve also been charged with metaphors about ecology and weather, location and climate—climate as both a social and psychological phenomenon. But by using drawing in these new images, the paintings have become more explicit and personally revelatory. CM: When you showed me some of these paintings this past summer, I felt that there was a certain political aspect to them, something that I hadn’t before picked up on. That feeling was informed in part by seeing the wall of drawings with many of the studies for Mogul. Joy Ride, 2012, oil on canvas, 44 x 55 in/112 x 140 cm RB: The title of that painting is indicative of my thinking about this body of work. In ski parlance, a mogul is something that’s a lot of fun to ski over when it’s covered with snow; but when the snow melts it’s revealed as a manmade sculptural protrusion, almost obscenely figurative. I was thinking about the pile in the painting as a kind of naked, cartoon landscape. The limited, dark palette based in greens and browns is a subjective palette that’s been reduced to the basic signifiers of landscape. I was also thinking a lot about the intense social and political conditions we’ve experienced since 2008. So Mogul refers to a rich and powerful man or woman and also to a pile of mud, a morass. CM: How do you feel the color refers to a social climate? RB: Because green refers to nature, and is also commonly used to signify ecological and environmental consciousness, activism, etc. Brown is the predominant color of fall and spring, and in the most obvious way, brown refers to shit— CM: Dirt. RB: —and to dirt, and to a morass, and to a place that most artists do not want to be in. Working in the mud, painting muddy paintings, dealing with the emotions surrounding muddiness. To me, those became metaphors that I wanted to work with because I was feeling a tremendous amount of anxiety coming from the outside world into the studio: economic recession, climate change, the election, even the situation at
Cooper Union—now that’s a morass! I was working upstate last year in isolation and with cabin fever. Things became exaggerated and heightened, very useful for making expressive paintings! Watching the news, I was reminded of the repression of the 1950s and the beginning of the New York School. The language of the conservative media echoed the strident, threatening language from that earlier period. I kept coming back to the basic idea of digging into the mud of painting, to arrive at an existential roadmap. CM: I can’t help but feel that the Mogul painting serves as a kind of cornerstone, that it grounds the rest of the works. RB: Yes, it locates an important theme in this body of work. But I like to create an ensemble of images that play off each other. Mogul is very graphic and voluptuous. The Hill is similar in composition, but has a lawn of brushstrokes, so it’s covered and flattened. It was painted as a close-up of the field in Rear-view, the first painting in this group, so the images are all related. CM: Many of these paintings present a sort of barrier or impasse to the viewer. There’s something being obscured, whether it’s what is behind the form in the more mountainous pictures, or as in Joy Ride, where we’re really being told: This is where it stops. On the other hand, with the windshield wiper painting, Dial, there’s an invitation to consider what’s on the other side. It’s not entirely clear whether the viewer is inside or outside the car. The Hill, 2012, oil on canvas, 44 x 55 in/112 x 140 cm RB: Yes, with the windshield wiper paintings, there is a going into and through a pictorial space. The atmosphere depicts lumpy clouds, shadows, menacing (but comic) weather, and black flecks, which in my paintings often refer to rain or anxiety. The windshield wiper is how the image operates as a metaphor, so it works independently of figurative logic. These paintings are psychological and imagistic, working as thought and event at the same time CM: Maybe the barriers I am thinking of come out of an emphasis on foreground. I think the black painting, Persian Lamb, with its nearly allover composition, operates in a similar way RB: That painting is like a tree that’s being thrown around in a violent storm. It also refers to a vivid experience I had a few summers ago, when I was painting on the west coast of Ireland. I kept hearing the sounds of crows at night as I was walking though the town of Ballycastle. The crows made mocking sounds—a cacophonous language of babbles, taunts, and cries. To me it seemed like a social commentary, a Joycean discord if you will, but also I took it personally, as if the crows were mocking me. It is an image derived from an internal dialogue that became the subject for this painting. A longer version of the conversation is available from the Alexander and Bonin web site.
Page 1: Dial, 2012, oil on canvas, 35 x 49

Robert Bordo - Alexander and Bonin

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