Pliny gives us the tale of `the power of painting to deceive the eye'. Zeuxis and Parrhasius wondered which of them could produce the most realistic representation in a painting. Zeuxis had painted grapes so realistically on a wall that birds were deceived enough to peck at the fruit. Parrhasius invited his rival to his studio to show one of his paintings which he thought might out do the depiction of grapes. When Zeuxis tried to lift the curtain from the panel to see the painting underneath he found that the draped curtains themselves were the actual painting. Zeuxis was happy to concede since he had only deceived birds whereas Parrhasius had fooled a human being. Although it is a questionable claim to say that to deceive a human is any harder than to deceive a bird, Parrhasius victory comes from the fact that he treated the object painting beyond the exercise of visual manipulation by exposing the extent to which vision relies on conventions. While Zeuxis gives new meaning to grapes, Parrhasius redefines painting itself, from inside and out. As an artist working primarily with illusion, I can’t help but always feel like I am wearing Zeuxis’ cloak every time I look at James Hyde’s work. For more than a decade James Hyde has been consistently questioning the epistemological mechanisms of painting through a seemingly inexhaustible array of experiments. What is an abstract after it can be recognized as such? Hyde’s works seem to ask. How can the project of abstraction be furthered within the vocabulary of painting? In the field of aesthetics, broad questions such as these demand a multitude of possible answers. In each work, Hyde appears to be repeating the same questions and answering them always in completely different ways. Vik Muniz - In a previous published text you likened your painting approach to "making your bed while still lying in it. Can you elaborate on this comparison? James Hyde - I tend to like work, which develops a critical relationship to an experience at the same time it presents it. When I make a painting I try to make an object that produces its own vibrant experience, an experience which leaks into the surrounding world and can provide a repository for other experiences and images. I regard this as the process of painting and frame it by calling attention to its conventions. It’s awkward --dissecting painting conventions with painting conventions. But by exposing its foundations and magic, I feel I can rediscover painting magically. I’ve been reading Harold and the Purple Crayon to my son. I had loved this book as a child and was recently thinking about how these adventures of this little boy who passes through the world as he creates it with his crayon is an exquisite paradigm for the magic of art. Rereading the book I realized the central magic act isn’t how he frightens himself by drawing a dragon or feeds himself by drawing pies, but how he is able to return home by the self conscious realization of how he is located in relation to what he has drawn. By framing a window around the moon he drew first, he manages to place himself back in his own room. And at he end of the book he "draws" up the covers of the bed—while lying in it—and goes to sleep! Vik Muniz - It is interesting to hear you mention a book which I always regarded as a book about the structure of belief, a dynamic process of meaning. It really makes me think of how your work, instead of building meaningful structures seems to concentrate on the ways in which one possible reading may flow into another. A first encounter with one of your pieces often triggers in me a cascading of perceptual modes in which the perception of object vacillates between that of a symbol or index or icon, never really assuming a definite meaning. There is certain kind of embarrassment involved with the incapacity of grasping immediate meaning out of things. I have always enjoyed these ambiguous moments when you "feel vision" instead of simply seeing something. How do you exercise control over these ambiguities and what is the extent that spontaneity plays in your practice of abstraction? James Hyde - Because of the multiple ways it gets used meaning becomes complex quickly. Meaning is used to denote or indicate—"I mean that thing, over there" as well as to define—"that word means…" and also to express value—"this means so much". We often hash up these various "meanings", and elide one aspect with another. Art does this very well, (and you orchestrate this masterfully with your photographs); a simple example--representational art has meaning, (value), because its images mean, (denote), objects. Perception and meaning are intimately entwined, (this is perhaps the symbolic meaning of Harold and the Purple Crayon). And already I see that your categories of perception--symbol, index and icon—make a delicious scramble of my categories of meaning. Abstraction is a great means to reconfigure and tamper with these codes and hierarchies; it can produce what Klaus Ottman has termed "formal terrorism" because it can topple the authority of established paths of understanding. The categorical scrambling can work like this. I use a piece of vinyl tape in a painting. At first glance it looks like a painted surface—it’s in a painting. Closer inspection reveals it to be a material, which is a substitute for paint—a mimetic relic. But its presentation is painterly which pulls its illusion from the social into a painting register. The tape is applied roughly, as opposed to its intended commercial application, which would have it smooth and seamless. While gesture is an accepted component of painting, in this painting it is not enshrined in the materiality of paint, but in its substitute’s application and even more emphatically, it is present by the way the surface is folded, bunched and pinched. The bulging of the surface produces the illusion that the edges of shapes of tape are curved, which bend the paths of vision gesturally. The painting is assembled from bits of actualities and illusions, to produce a text and texture of vision, or as you succinctly put it to allow its viewer to "feel vision". Vik Muniz - Your work points outward to a form of narrative that seems to extend beyond the painted plane; a narrative imbedded in the entire structure of the object from the choice of material to information about the support’s fabrication. The notion of "building" a painting or something that will become a painting as if telling its story as it is happening, combining narrative and presence. It makes me think of surgery or commercial aviation where the narrator and the performer are the same person. James Hyde - In a way, I treat painting as an anthropological subject. I look at it as a type of man-made object in relationship with other objects. A few years ago I began working on a series of photographs which explored the way painting elements circulate in the material world of automobiles. It is fascinating how much modernism gets replayed in car culture—from the design cycles of little avant-gardes to the hard smooth surfaces of the roads and cars to speed, ergonomics and the way the windshield makes its own landscape. I became very involved the way little bits of customization and "accidents" could become very poignant. About the same time began to make handles and furniture. These objects are morphologically and metaphorically related to paintings. I like the way paintings and furniture both inhabit and construct domestic space--also the way chairs and handles propose figurative gestures and the way shelves make empty space. It was interesting to develop my painterly concerns with objects, which wouldn’t call themselves paintings. Vik Muniz - It is also interesting how decisions on how to classify a work will significantly bear on how the object will get to be built. Usually when someone starts building something, he or she has a clear definition of what the thing is going to be at the end. In your case however, the act of building seems to aim towards something that should not be. It always feels like you are stretching the meaning and form of the works just to see the moment when these things pop-up. James Hyde - There’s always something of a narrative in my painting with how it is put together. One of my favorite things about traveling is exploring how people construct their homes and make their buildings. The obvious decorative things are great but I am always eager to see how different countries do their plumbing. It says a lot about the place—the bottom-line pragmatic and unlovely American stuff, the weepy pipes of London, the well-machined and carefully fitted German gear and the French water line valves which have a nineteenth century high-tech look. I think about the construction of material culture as type of narrative. As a painter I’m concerned with the processes of how painting is constructed and recognized. I try to keep this narrative legible—making the actions of coating, covering marking or folding distinct as gestures so that they are both an action and a description of an action. Vik Muniz- And How did you arrive at that? James Hyde- When I started out as an abstract painter twenty years ago I was fascinated how material could have such power in itself. The immanent qualities of plaster, glass, metal, wood and paint were incredibly absorbing. Focusing on actualities made this work a type of realism. It’s strange, but today in our material culture you can work with materials in a direct and plain way and produce illusion. In twenty years materials have become so sophisticated and subsumed by our voracious image culture, that the quality of actuality in materials has to be constructed, or perhaps exists as a residue after use and metaphor are exhausted. The panels of my fresco on Styrofoam paintings have been described as "alpine" and "cloud-like", but also as "cheesy" and as "industrial waste". I like the way this material gathers these contradictory images and the way the panel creates imagery at least as vividly as the painted fresco. At the same time the Styrofoam is an immensely practical support for the fresco surface. The blocks hold the surface way off the wall showing off the conjuring trick of the suspended vertical screen of painting. Vik Muniz - What about when these contradictions are flattened by a form of presentation? I am talking about the glass boxes paintings to be more specific. James Hyde -The glass boxes are a petri-dishs of material/image transformations. The actual depth of the box allows me to paint on a background such as paper or acetate then crumple it, revising it as a gesture. Marks, backgrounds, line, objects, applied and material color are parts of this mutating ecosystem of images and actualities. As well as our habit of seeing materials as images, the glass itself is a material cipher for "picture". Gluing the optically heavy paint passages to the transparent glass plays painting’s magical suspended screen again in a different way. The cover glass waylays the dimensional aspects of the contents and brings it all up to the smooth cover plane. It creates the illusion that the painting is flat—that same flatness which is the foundational beginning for a Zeuxis-like illusionism! Vik Muniz - How does the mark-making, the painting itself fit with these presentations? James Hyde - There is another way of working that doesn’t construct. I often set up my paintings so there is an arena where painting is performed. We were talking about seeing a UN translator on TV going from French to English with barely a second lag. This performance of painting is a translation of seeing and doing. It’s hard to talk about translation in an expansive way—you can’t translate an act of translation. So it’s not about knowing what you are doing, but doing through what you know. Anyway this type of performance is very close to how fresco is painted. In the six hours of making the painting, areas and landmarks are delineated, then lost, then reconstituted or found elsewhere, all the time part to whole relations and--because fresco is a fairly transparent medium—the little histories of mark making are all part of the operating mix. It revels in intimacy and complexity. After the six hours are over the fresco is finished. The question then isn’t so much is the result good or bad, but how can the performance be evaluated—personally and technically--how does resonate within its frame. I don’t amend fresco, so either it is covered, broken or remains. Vik Muniz - I can see the importance of a referential edification when dealing with abstraction in the way you’ve chosen to call some of your works painting and others furniture. How do you go about deciding if a piece is a painting or something to sit on and how does one body of work submit to the other? James Hyde - That’s such a good question I’d like to leave it unanswered. I structure much of my work along the lines of questions and its how the work signifies. How do paintings relate to home furnishings—to the esthetic processes of developing the personal and the particulars of a place? In my work I alternate between using something’s name to define or frame that object and using its name as particular quality of the object. I have paintings that are furniture-like—these pieces address their viewers in part with the language of furniture operation. I have furniture that follows my sense of painting and I pieces that call themselves useful, but aren’t—they’re a bit like prototypes without production. But its not these categories as such that interests me, but the mobile indexing of abstraction to particularities and the actual. Vik Muniz - I think that the actual is also subject to the same mobile indexing that you have suggested as present in abstraction. As a matter of fact, I believe this to be one of the most interesting things about abstract art; the fact that we are dealing primarily with the lagging of perception of the real in relation to what’s conventional in visual cognition. To grasp what is actual we are making these compromises, mending fragmented impressions and faithfully believing in the continuously maintenance of a consciousness that is wholesome and linear. Abstraction somehow lets you in these interstitial spaces, and undefined instances. The comforting pleasure of abstraction, at least for me, rests on the assurance of the existence of this noise, the background and perhaps the ultimate support of familiarity. How do you think can the idea of genre survive in the context of abstract painting? James Hyde - Accepting abstract painting as a genre was very liberating for me. It has allowed me to use it as a vehicle and not just a type of picture-making or modeling. I work within abstract painting, through it and around it. There are many contradictions working with a genre that defines itself as undefinable. But contradiction is an important tool if you want to cruise those interstitial spaces or listen to that background noise which is the sound of the world when representation hasn’t quite caught it. go to top (c) 2001 design by www.kyung.com