Interview Between Wil Murray & Kim Neudorf
December 2007

KN: “I think painting is mostly one part of me yelling at another” – I like how you said yelling here; its more direct and honest-sounding than say, singing or fighting. Yelling because one part needs to be woken up, or reminded of the stakes?

WM: I wrote that very recently, in reference to trying to slow down the decisions I have, until now, made very quickly. It feels a bit like a younger sibling getting old enough to challenge the teenage fiefdom of an older sibling.  While each sibling is me.

Most of the time I have to yell at myself to not be lazy while doing the work to find what laziness is so I can address and undress it properly. This doesn’t, however, mean that I listen. Some marks have to be made in defiance of any part of me that is willing to yell to get its way.

There is a very stubborn 17 year old inside of me still that I’ve made many deals with just to play for time.

KN: Your painting titles can be so full of texture, very fun to read and say, and they’re not only playing with words as one-liners that fall down flat. You mentioned you’re making in-jokes too. What are some of these in-jokes?

WM: Mostly, the in-jokes are not art in-jokes, but ones among friends.

“Intention Grading For The Modern Road Re-Surfacer” comes from a friend wondering if all the good intentions around her meant she must be on the road to hell, combined with the unbelievable titles of manuals for employees and my own questioning of intention in my work.

“Sexing Up The Lipsticked Pork” comes from so much discussion with a friend about lipstick on pigs or hubcaps on tractors. And then reading some article on that English case where a public servant or journalist committed suicide after being found out. He’d been, in every article on the matter, “sexing up” some government documents. I wanted the title to be disgusting. Originally, this was the title of the show.

I usually have an idea for the title and write it out in many variations for days.

This year there has been a lot of bathroom jokes too. “Why Are You Looking Up Here The Joke Is In Your Hand” is some of the best bathroom graffiti. In my head I first saw it at the Blackfoot Truckstop, but I think I am mistaking it with the large outline of a penis drawn in chalk on a chalk board. I guess you never really mean to remember things that you see in the bathroom, so all memories from there are hazy and mixed together.

“Fuck This Mothafuckin’ Pool” was scrawled on the side of the pool in neighbourhood and I just loved how forcefully, in the dead of winter, someone could hate a pool.

KN: Where does the title “Brawl of the Beast” come from, reside, or mutate from?

WM: The title comes from Djuna Barnes’ book Nightwood. In the Chapter titled “Watchman, What of The Night?”(p.107), Doctor O’Connor, on a long monologue about the night and lovers and filth, says to Nora (Robin Vote’s rejected American lover) that “The French have made a detour of filthiness - Oh, the good dirt! Whereas you are of a clean race, of a too eagerly washing people, and this leaves no road for you. The brawl of the Beast leaves a path for the Beast. You wash your brawl with every thought, with every gesture, with every conceivable emollient and savon and expect to find your way again…”

This is one of my favourite chapters, one of my favourite books. In a rather sentimental turn, a show on my 30th birthday in Alberta makes me consider where I have been. Awkwardly I will say that I think my own brawl has left a path for me.

In my painting the process described here is also very true.

 KN: You wrote that what is interesting about the constant rebirth of painting is the “emancipated heroic formal relief, the permanent and hopeful stalwart release, or the hard-working under-appreciated and intelligent relief”, but that this rebirth cycle “never really gets at what painting does”. You also said painting’s time-based labored quality inherently “suggests refinement and elegance”. You wrote that painting can be about not reacting to the cycle, not living in it. What is it that painting does that is barely or never acknowledged by the accelerated “idea” of painting?

WM: I think you’ve misunderstood a bit what I meant. The “emancipated heroic…” bit was what I see championed every time painting gets re-discovered and what dismays me every time.
It is saddening to see so many old themes continue to find purchase with people, but they might not be wrong.

I think that more is possible in painting than gets discussed in these re-births. The kind of constant re-discovery of very ascetic modernist forms by painters feels so much like a kitsch relationship to something that wasn’t a joke. It feels like going to church at Christmas because you think it’s nice, and then talking about how organized religion is stupid blind faith and priests are child-molesting patriarchs the rest of the year. They didn’t open the church so you’d have somewhere to go at Christmas and something to hate the rest of the year, just like Pollock didn’t paint so that you could drip paint and laugh at him.

I don’t know that I am doing anything more than ranting here, and I make myself queezy with criticisms like this. For some reason I can’t stop thinking about the guy I saw in Vancouver leaving “disco night” at the Commodore. He seemed really happy in his large fake afro and open shirt and sunglasses and all I could think was “Man, I hope he wakes up tomorrow and decides to keep wearing that stuff every day”. I loved him for his happiness.

I should add that I really hate Halloween.

KN: What are the most heroic, permanent and hopeful stalwart, and hard-working under-appreciated and intelligent aspects of painting?

WM: This is hard, given what I wrote above. I guess you want me to describe the attributes I alluded to. I always think of Christmas with the kind of work I’m talking about. Like you can take the piss out of Christmas all you want, but we all have some love for it. Or even a hatred is powerfully in orbit with it.

Painting is beautiful. It does beautiful well. Or maybe it is that it is so old, it invented half the words we use to describe beauty. Like how an old friend shifts from being someone you describe your life to, to someone that is the reason why your life is the way it is and how you describe it.

KN: In your interview with Marie-Douce St. Jacques, you spoke about painting focusing on a kind of death drive or narrative which, by nature, is made of a self-generating repetition. I read a great line by Diana Thorneycroft about how working in the studio, creating, can be compared to the drive of a pervert, a criminal, in focus and needs. Is your work based on a kind of repetition or repetitive drive, not of the same painting, but of the same performance?

WM: I’ve often compared art making with addiction. No to say anything as trite as “I am addicted to art-making” but when I track a few of the behaviours and watch how working in the studio affects my life and those I love, there are a ton of similarities to when I was a drug addict.

I’m always shocked when I hear artists use words from self-help like co-dependent to negatively describe their own behaviours or relationships. It seems to me that the participation in an art practice necessitates you being many of the things that the self-help movement seeks to eliminate.  
  
In the same interview, I discuss sickness as well. My fascination with sickness began when I was using. As an addict, you play doctor and patient and these roles get very very nuanced and ornate with time. Some imagined sickness/cure binary that mirrors the most simplistic morality(good/bad) expands into a system so precarious that it is always slipping into chaos because you start to lose the framework to tell sickness from cure that you had in the beginning.

Painting is much like crystal meth. If I am left to myself I will just keep doing it, going back to it without consulting anyone. I can lower and raise moral walls to make a trap for myself that ends only in drugs or the studio. I’m not cool about my addiction, like I can’t say it is here nor there whether I paint or smoke meth…I know I can do either, and what is required of me by each and I just can’t face being as lonely as I was on drugs. That’s saying a lot, given how lonely painting is.

I imagine Thorneycroft is getting at the same thing here. If I were doing anything else that took me away so much, that I had to take care of so closely, that I had to hide so well from others, that I had to be so calculating about, that I had to occasionally hide away, those who love me would have had an intervention ages ago.

KN: We were talking earlier about the anti-climactic feeling after a show, after a painting is finished. You’ve written about how people talk about your paintings but their language doesn’t seem as real as what they might mean, what they’re really seeing, and that they’re merely using language they’re used to using. When do people begin to talk about what they see and push their language, when does it happen, how? And when do people start to really talk about painting? When have you heard this or read this?

WM: I think that people speak most clearly in sideways or half statements over time more than in some large and complete manner.

That said, a good friend, Gavin, once blurted out some very perfect things about a painting while we got dressed, half-drunk, to go out in Vancouver and I wound up giving him the painting because of that. He still has it and talks to me regularly about it, and now knows it better than I do.

I think people speak best about one painting they know privately. They argue with themselves about it, and that process re-orders their language about a painting. The painting doesn’t give them any new vocabulary, but in its slowness allows them to work the imaginary painting that we would discuss into something personal that they can describe and fight for in a conversation with me. I get deposed as expert for the painting having lived next to them.

KN: When you write about your work as what can be looked down into and through the narrative of its creation, this makes me think of how film is sometime written about – how you can only see “directly” in a back and forth and forward direction, naturally and mentally linking everything you’ve seen to what you’re now seeing. I don’t mean to forcibly link film to painting, but that reading your paintings is a very active and activating process, much like contemporary theories on film that talk about movement that isn’t linear but based on phenomenology and the “machines of affect” (Deleuze).

WM: I live describing the “looking down the narrative” in bars. How many times have  I placed a beer glass in front of a wine glass in front of another beer glass and got someone to crouch down with me at table-level and look a them, foreshortened. If each were a mark on a painting, you see very clearly how each mark is not whole, only what is left alone is seen in the final image. The last mark on a painting is whole, the rest are parts.

I crap out on discussing Deleuze, because I don’t retain much from what I read and most of my knowledge is from discussions with friends about his ideas and others. The names get forgotten. But some part of my brain marked Deleuze nods at what you’ve said here. I like his books and Guattari’s because I will probably have to read them for my whole life.

KN: You wrote about how painting can continue to suggest readings, narratives, and painting (using the double use of the word) beyond its maker; “the horrible of hope in horrible futures” (from a description of your work, naming links from literature). Does painting have power and communication and readings that can be both horrible, horribly hopeful (beyond hopes), and yet without this quality would just be watered down and weak?

WM: I think what you’re getting at is what I see is more possible in painting than other mediums, and often left un-explored in the painting phoenix discussion. I think that painting becomes a very incidental medium when singular ideas are pursued. I want a painting to at once be the painters, the subjects, and the objects.

Maybe the only example I can think of is from literature. Djuna Barnes wrote books so rich that you couldn’t discern the story from the telling or from her. They teeter, always. And they never comfort you with any hope beyond their own end, or their representation of hope.
Sometimes I think of painting like writing a book by writing each letter written on top the last. So that all you would have is a messy spot to stare at.

The readings of painting can be so many things at once, and I want them to be as many things at once as possible. I am suspicious of boiling-down ideas or distilling them because I don’t understand how you would separate out one idea to start boiling it down. I want to scream, something like 20 words at once from my own mouth.

KN: The visceral and sculptural aspects of your most recent work (and reading about your process – peeled, sausaged, cut and removed, re-applied) has the rare reality of texture and the time-based realities of creating texture that one-dimensional paintings can only usually illustrate and suggest. They also make me think about visceral and multi-sensorial empathy with the skin and body of the paintings – embedding, biting, and especially the humor and abjectness of variously released pressure, but without being merely cartoony.

WM: It is very interesting that the increasingly sculptural qualities of my work get so much attention. At the same time this year that the spray foam and the paint skins were pressing out further and further, I was starting to work into the space of the painting with brush and tube more than I have ever before. This seems stranger to me, having never really been a traditional painter. But I figured that if the paint was going to extend in a very real way outward, I could probably manage it moving illusionistically into the painting as well.

The ridiculous and disgusting can fly places that the simply pretty cannot. As I said before, painting is beautiful….even Dubuffet’s ugly paintings are. That said, I’ve backed myself into a corner where I am gauging the beauty of something like spray-foam as I apply it. Sometimes this always ugly material is just too ugly. Sometimes the qualities that make a painting ridiculous are not interesting, they are parodies of another painting and I have to deal with that. The texture is strange, sometimes I think it mostly comes from my never having been a real painter.

KN: This is a very telling description from another review: “the coulourfield use of industrial products that erase human touch, the expressionism of a style that reasserts its place with the  early gestural abstract painters”. What is your response to the idea that your color field associates that which “erase[s] human touch”, even while reassurting its language?

WM: I think that when I started painting this was a little more fascinating for me than it is now. Up until I started pouring paint, most of my work has been charcoal drawings on paper. They were filled to the brim with “human touch”, lots of expressive marks. Even the times I would use a ruler, the messiness yelled touch very loud. I started painting these monochromatic, masked works that sought to erase any evidence of my hand from the final work. I started pouring paint that dried glossy and perfect and kept at that for years. This past year, with a switch to acrylic that got fucked with and a space opened up for touch to re-enter and I furtively started leaving evidence of my own hand and loving it.

I think being raised and starting to paint in Calgary, where one is absolutely removed from almost all works chosen as influence, I just didn’t think about it that much because all the painting I saw and loved I saw in photographs. Even when I saw Gerhard Richter paintings when I was 18 I found it easier to digest on the postcard from the museum shop than in real life.

Initially I wanted to make paintings that “looked finished” and evidence of touch didn’t enter into that. A change in that is due partly to seeing more paintings in real life. Seeing Jules Olitski paintings in Ken Moffett’s basement, it becomes clear that they are human-made.

I don’t think it is impossible to work mediums that erase human touch while indicating the human touch that used them. David Hoffos’ installations come to mind. Seeing them, you are reminded that no matter how alienating technology can be, he is present in every bit of black tape and shitty video camera barely hidden by the dark. I always think that you can really do everything with anything if you are really fucking good at what you do, but you have to change the world while you’re doing this to make what you do seem good and hard to attempt, which, if you do all these things at once, is hard.

KN: I’ve read about how your practice didn’t really begin until after you left ACAD – how do you think about your art school years now?

WM: I think I am bit more forgiving of myself and my instructors these days. I didn’t really understand how to reconcile the two things that came to a head in school while I was there.

On the one hand my peacocking and charms were given a new and weightier venue than ever and they hit a feverish pitch. I’ve always thought that it is much more fun to choose when and where a game occurs than to play the game already at hand, and art school was a grand venue for that. I had amazing partners in this in Heather Kvill and drugs and a family history that includes a small traveling circus in the 40s.

I remember being six or so in school and I’d been sick for a day. During my absence, the kids I was friends with started playing some game that involved throwing hockey cards toward a wall. The one who got it nearest won all the cards thrown in each round. I didn’t have any cards with me and didn’t want it going any further without me so I convinced them all that what they were doing was gambling and illegal and they stopped. I wasn’t happy, but was less panicked about my own position. You can make things work for you if you’re willing to be a little violent, and art school was no different. It was too easy to do well and I felt like a monster and wasn’t at all comfortable with seeing myself like that then.

On the other I had a growing love for painting going on. I hadn’t really painted until I attended school, and was a little shocked that I’d fallen into something so huge and took it seriously. I was near tears describing my surprising attachment to what my hand was doing and what I was seeing. I didn’t think I would care so much about something I’d chosen to do to piss people off and get noticed.

This is all fine and good and a lovely story, but it took years for me to reconcile that my role in the studio and out was to be a painter who changed the world around me so that what I was doing was deemed authentic, and meaningful possible only in my hands. I can, if I concentrate really hard in the studio and in the beer hall and the gallery, be a very persuasive painter. But I didn’t know then that all of it was needed and not at odds with each other.

Only once the audience wasn’t built in did I actually do the work to learn this and it was really hard and I still don’t know it. But I value it more, both the paintings and my own methods to promote and disseminate and research my ideas. I had no prepared script, as I hadn’t dreamed of being a painter. I needed some years on my own to become one.

KN: You’ve written about how you feel your work is different from formalist painters, and that your process involves a kind of neverending regeneration of new rules without any definitive end or straight answer, so to speak. Is there an aspect of multiple performance and diversion from legibility or identity in your work? Is there also an aspect of claiming narratives and readings on your own terms (“Pathologize the marks you mythologized yesterday”)?

WM: I’m not joking when I refer to the many mes that speak in the making of a painting. Part of it is connected to painting each day, in that each mark changes both the composition and my assessment of that painting and all rules I hold until that point about painting. I can’t imagine trying to seek cohesion in my own identity as represented by the paintings I make. I often think that I do not exist, except with others because I’m not really anything if not perceived by another. But by the same token, all others are me because there simply is no place for me that I am not. We kind of come to each other obliquely and rub a little.

I don’t really care for people’s descriptions of themselves unless I am able to also have the imaginary them in my head informed by all kinds of small things they do when they are around me. I like the gentle and casual lies that we all use to describe ourselves and the actions that betray them.

The paintings wind up keeping a bit of a record of the now gone mes that made them. Much like I wonder at why I don’t simply kill my neighbour for shoveling snow in front of my window, I wonder at the things that remain consistent in the repeated performance each night in the studio. But I am an easy victim of routine, and it solicits my most destructive and lazy urges. In the studio I can manage intense routine and mount offensives against it as well. I think we’re back to one part of me screaming at another.

KN: One writer described your work in these terms: “as everyday phenomena relating to our bodies, our cultural dispositions and our involvement within a pluralistic culture of consumption”. Would you link this kind of phenomena and pluralistic consumption to your work?

WM: I still don’t feel like have a handle on what Jeremy Todd was getting at with that essay, but I love it. I’m always fascinated by the assured yes that is answered to the question “Do you want more choice?” Around products and websites especially.  Also, the idea that everyone want things to be interactive. How could I not think of these things, given paintings non-interactive nature.

KN: I really empathize and love what you’ve written about “the relief of not having to act, to encourage, to put in motion or to stop” and painting’s nature of unlimited time; also of how you won’t attempt “battering a painting into a single narrative”. Although my work is about old-fashioned illusion and is image-based, I have no idea what I would do if I tried to create a conventional narrative space, a single narrative space.

WM: I am always amazed by statements I make in the negative, as they often mean I will fuck with them eventually, or at least soften “never” to “rarely”.

KN: Do you often create work which also lives within what you are reading, listening to, seeing, in terms of what you can quote, record, and reference? What have you been reading, listening to, and seeing most recently that has shocked or contaminated you in wonderful or horrible ways?

WM: I do. More than anything, literature comes to mind. I’m still reading Djuna Barnes and John Hawkes and always will. I just started reading Carson McCullers’ “The Heart is A Lonely Hunter” and will likely be raving about it for a while.

Beyond that, I find pizza menus in Montreal hold colour secrets I couldn’t have imagined and I am a perpetual TV watcher.

Working on the future, specifically Sled Island, and returning home I am again obsessed with Calgary’s weirdness. Lately I’ve thought that Calgary’s ravenousness for itself means that in destroying its history and re-building it, it rarely looks to other cities for comparison and instead has a tendency to compare each time’s renovation to the last one on the same spot. I think there’s something in that about my painting too.