FROM ART AND CULTURE:
HUMAN AND ALIEN
NOV 5, 2013 | BENJAMIN TERRY | ONE COMMENT | ART, NORTH TEXAS
Matthew Bourbon Lets “Internal Disputes” Play Out in Paint
The Dallas Museum of Art recently awarded Texas Biennial participant Matthew Bourbon the Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant. Bourbon a painter, critic and associate professor of art at the University of North Texas in Denton, will use it in the spring to conduct research for his painting practice in Tokyo and Kyoto. Bourbon’s work in TX 13 remains on view through Nov. 9 at San Antonio’s Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum; he spoke with Dallas artist Benjamin Terry about why he paints.
A+C: WHAT ARE TYPICAL CONCERNS YOU HAVE?
Matthew Bourbon: My concerns are not steady. Sometimes a phrase or title will elicit a painting. Occasionally I move in one direction and end in someplace entirely unpredicted. At the start of my process I draw images directly onto canvas until some friction occurs. It is a collage-like process, where I move painted components in and out of the frame of the painting until I am intrigued. Invariably I am responding to my source material, and my initial reaction to film stills, advertising photographs, etc., drives this early activity.
This procedure of sifting through the abundance of imagery that bombards us and then recapitulating my relationship to my adopted images is important to me. In some sense this becomes a social or political activity. I don’t think my work is overtly political or topical in the normal way people associate with political art, but my interaction with and transformation of found imagery is a kind of taking possession, or at least explaining to myself what all these sources can mean to me.
A+C: YOU OFTEN PUT PAINTINGS WITHIN PAINTINGS TO ALLOW YOURSELF THE FREEDOM TO PAINT SOMETHING DIFFERENT. DO YOU EVER FEEL LIKE YOU’RE STUCK WORKING IN A SPECIFIC AESTHETIC, OR DO YOU EVER HAVE THE URGE TO MAKE A DIVERGENT BODY OF WORK?
MB: Yes, on both counts. I do have desires to do different things in my work, and the painting-within-a-painting approach feeds this desire. I also like the idea of setting up different values or competing constituencies within the constrained format of a painting. Since all artworks are arguments for their own existence and importance, in some small way mine argue to the world, but they also have an internal dispute about what a painting is or should be.
Maybe it reveals my wide-ranging appetites, but it also exposes a skepticism I have of singular ways of making art. It is a minor critique of my own insistence on retaining certain things within my paintings — like the human figure, for instance. Recently I have started letting words creep into my paintings; it feels bracing to be expansive about what can exist within the frame of painting and also unnerving. It is certainly easier to drop balls flying in the air when one juggles eight, instead of three, but it is also more exciting.
A+C: GIVEN NEW MEDIA, WHY PAINT? WHY CONTINUE TO EXPLORE ABSTRACTION?
MB: I have heard this question before and it honestly cracks me up. It presupposes some kind of hierarchy of value in mediums or genres, which I think is anachronistic and wrong-headed.
If my interest were in new media, or gouache, or porcelain, than that is what I would be doing. Yes, there is a shorter history to new media, so one is less burdened by the long arc of history. In this sense it is easier to make one’s mark in this territory.
But, if I reflect on my own interests, then I do have to admit I have a dedication to painting. I value the slowness of painting as an experience. Paintings are active as they envision worlds, ideas and patterns, yet they are completely immobile. It is this combination that makes them powerful.
The stillness, silence and physicality of painting places us in our bodies very differently than photography, new media or sculpture. Photographs are flat, materially uninflected and ubiquitous in our lives. Paintings, however, are intimately crafted, and the human residue of their making links them from artist to viewer in a unique manner. This may suggest romanticism, but I do believe that the corporeal skin of painting is visceral, even in works seeking to eliminate the “hand” of the artist.
New media, by comparison, is familiar to how we function today — with everyone looking at screens every two seconds. Sculpture is akin to how we always move through the world —bumping into objects in space. Painting, however, is unusual—dare I say special?— because it involves looking and experiencing in a fashion that feels distinctive. This unusual and conflicted presence is in part why I am a painter. Painting seems human and alien at the same time.
—BENJAMIN TERRY
FROM MODERN LUXURY:
STRANGER THAN TRUTH
Painter Matthew Bourbon’s vague vignettes and anonymous portraits
resonate with multiple points of view and ambiguous narrative intrigues
By Steve Carter
Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
-Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man
It’s a quietly loud painting. At first glance, stridence and gesture are everything; after a time, tantalizing ambiguity and question marks ultimately hold sway. Two figures, probably male, are involved in an altercation, a transaction, a misunderstanding? The deep colors of their clothing are complexly muted, while their visages are striped abstractions, bold striations of absolute color that merge the figures into a Gestus of confrontation. On the wall behind, a framed image of a nude woman seems to look on—an audience? A backstory? In the foreground, a Japonisme-derived vase and bowl introduce a Zen hush, an ironic, fragile tranquility that offsets the enigma of the focal pas de deux. Even the title, “Sentimental Beasts,” is ripe with paradox, inviting repeated viewings and conjecture. Matthew Bourbon, the painter behind the conundrum, may have the answers, but if he does, he’s keeping his secrets.
“I like situations where it’s not clear exactly what’s happening or how we should read the vignette,” the artist reveals candidly. “I’m interested in the vagueness of things, with the psychology of a particular situation: with multiple people in the room and something going on, it sets up questions and uncertainties, maybe moral uncertainties. So who do I affiliate myself with in this painting? With which point of view? Should I feel comfortable, or should I feel uncomfortable based upon this scenario? I like the idea that viewers come to something that’s sort of charged in some way, and the interpretations can be dramatically different, because of who they’re attaching themselves to within the piece, and what the power situation is…” While Bourbon’s artistic influences include Jim Jarmusch films like Mystery Train, Raymond Carver short stories (“Neighbors” is a favorite), and the works of the late British figurative painter Euan Uglow, the source materials for his works are anything but esoteric. An inveterate collector of found images, which he carefully catalogs in a profusion of files, the artist’s real inspirations lean toward the bourgeois and banal: photographs, film stills, television, book illustrations, magazine advertising and comics—the incessant, ubiquitous visual buzzing of our culture.
Born in California in 1970, Matthew Bourbon grew up in the Bay Area. Although his artistic talent was evident from an early age, he started college with the idea of becoming a filmmaker. Art classes at UC Davis quickly turned his life around. “I stumbled into this incredible art program,” Bourbon says, and he cites his studies with pop art/mass culture painter Wayne Thiebaud and artist Squeak Carnwath, known for her celebrations of quotidian mundanity, as especially valuable. After graduating with BA’s in Art History and Art Studio, Matthew opted to pursue his MFA at New York’s School of Visual Arts. The seeds of his current work were sown at that time, a fusion of disparities that gradually coalesced. Frustrated with his previous painting output, Bourbon began a series of drawings defined only by line, devoid of value shading. At about the same time, he’d become fascinated with taking photos of televised images, mainly old films. “I’d sort of lost my faith in the work I was doing,” he recalls, “and that’s when I made the shift of trying to make the paintings based on just line, on paper, in oil, but starting from these sources of films. That was really the genesis of my work…that was a big breakthrough for me.” Another contributing serendipity was the primitive nature of his process. His shot-off-the-TV-screen photos were pre-digital, and subject to the vagaries of cheap processing, glares, reflections, halos, and erratic color effects, all of which he began to mimic on his canvases as elements of abstraction. “I started to incorporate lots of color within these figurations, which started to develop into more complicated patterns,” he notes. Making lemonade from lemons, Bourbon knew he was onto something.
In a recent solo exhibition at El Centro’s H. Paxton Moore Fine Art Gallery, Bourbon’s focus was a series of “anonymous portraits,” a twist on the idea of an unidentified painter. In this case, the subjects of the paintings themselves were the anonymous side of the equation—the artist didn’t know any of them. “A lot of my sources came from film stills, advertising, newspaper clippings; I purposefully pick people I don’t know,” Matthew admits. “I wanted this idea of me building a relationship to something that was foreign to me, that was in the media, out there, speaking to me, and then my own kind of building a bridge to it, creating my own import for it, versus what its perceived meaning was in its actual source.” The effete self-absorption of the female subject in “Stop Pretending You’re Nice” is palpable, suggested by the near-miss of her gaze and disquietingly practiced half-smile. The flesh tones of the face are established through a composite of broad daubs of pigment, a sort of pointillism-on-steroids that has more in common with expressionism than impressionism. For this series of portraits, Bourbon worked on 16” square canvases, creating a static playing field not unlike the uniformity of serial cells in a comic book. For the last two years he’s eschewed oil paint for its slow drying time and luminosity; acrylics, with their rapid drying time and flat finish, are perfect for his recent concerns and evolving technical requirements.
Now living in Denton, where he’s an Associate Professor of Drawing and Painting at UNT, Matthew Bourbon juggles his time between the demands of academia, painting, and family life. He also writes extensively about art as a critic, a part-time career that dates back to his graduate school days in New York; he’s a regular contributor to Art Forum online, ARTnews, Flash Art International, Art Lies, NY Arts, and KERA radio. Although he hasn’t become the filmmaker he’d once imagined he’d be, his unique sensibilities about nonlinear visual narratives seem to come from the very essence of who he is. “I think every artist’s work, whether they’re loathe to admit it or not, is autobiographical in some way,” he maintains. “In my case, the autobiography comes out in my concerns.” And why his ongoing predilection for the nonlinear, the ambiguous? “I think part of it is my lack of faith in one story, one story told with one point of view,” he answers. “It just feels more honest to me somehow, more true to the way that I move through the world and understand the world; I don’t attach myself to just one way of describing the world, or thinking about it. In some small way it’s a kind of humility, that as an artist you’re giving some perspective, but it’s not the definitive view. I think that I’d feel uncomfortable trying to come up with some distinct narrative story that’s supposed to carry everything that are my concerns. It’s easier for me to deal with these kind of vignettes, and maybe somehow they’ll build up into a sense of what I find important, as a person, and as an artist.”
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Get the bigger picture online at www.matthewbourbon.com. Bourbon has exhibited locally at Conduit Gallery (www.conduitgallery.com), Brookhaven College Center for the Arts, H. Paxton Moore Fine Art Gallery at El Centro College, UNTartspaceFW, Kimbell Art Museum, and widely across the state and around the country.