Interview

J.S.: Your works are enigmatic and colorful explorations of the world you are living in. You once described them as a “souvenirs of a fictional as well as an actual place”.¹ Would you agree with me, that they are similar to memories we have, which become misty and varnished memories over time?

I.M: It seems to me that the faux nostalgia that motivates a lot of the work evaporates in the finished presence of the paintings. They are so obviously contemporary, but I guess memories are too. A friend will tell me a story I relate to, or I’ll read first-hand accounts of 19th century California, and ‘facts’ will be exposed. But the finished paintings are more (f)actual than the data that makes them up. Sometimes I have the feeling that memories are bigger than facts and sometimes a paintings’ physical fact-ness makes memory irrelevant.

J.S.: I am also intrigued by the idea of narrative non-representation in your work. Can you tell me more about it?

I.M.: There are a lot of things that I can’t or don’t want to depict, so I use a pattern and/or activity as its surrogate. Because I work from what I know visually, and lack imagination, I’m left with a very limited number of ideas. This is part of the reason for the repetition. It might be why Blake’s Tyger² looks like a Teddy Bear or Durer’s rhino³ looks funny. Lack of imagination is also a reason for the non-representation. Sometimes I’m working with subject matter like trauma or something molecular and/or divine, and feel that response and description are better off without explanation.

J.S.: In 2004 you took part in AB OVO, a multi-media project organized by artist Steven Hull.⁴ 19 artists were asked to fill out the MMPI-2TM⁵, an empirically based assessment of adult psychopathology, which was developed in the 1940s for child custody settings. You were one of 19 artists to illustrate children’s stories by nineteen writers who, in turn, based their ideas on the test profiles of another 19 artists including Mike Kelley or Inka Essenhigh. A lot of interesting tales and works were produced in connection with this project. You illustrated a story titled Just because you have a hammer written by Mady Schutzman. Two works we have in the Collection (Sammlung Goetz, Munich), Made in Minn., 2004 and Postcard (with Tail Lights), 2004 were especially created for the project. Schutzman’s story is about two boys named Harvey and Dwight, who live in a town called Crossroads, Minnesota, which specializes in the production of hammers. Harvey got a hammer for his third birthday and used it for everything. He even uses it to squash his vegetables, because he hates vegetables. Made in Minn. illustrates this part of the short story. How many other works did you produce for this project?

I.M: I did three total. I depicted what wasn’t depicted in the story. I took what might be peripheral to its supposed subject matter and concentrated on that. Harvey & Dwight’s mom cried “big frustrated tears”⁶ and this seemed important. Her activity became another product of Crossroads, Minnesota, like their hammers, so I made an ad for that. At Passover Seder⁷ tables, participants dip bitter herbs in salt water to signify the tears their ancestors shed in Egypt. Now, with Mindmacher’s Frustrated Tears‚ you no longer have to bother with mixing this recipe, just buy the tears ready-made. Or, maybe the painting suggests something you can do with the hammer, especially if you don’t like vegetables.

J.S.: I quite like the idea, that everything produced in Crossroads is manufactured into a product, even human tears. It seems like a comment on America in general: the heaven of ready-made products. Was that also something you had in mind?

I.M.: So much great work over the last few decades has engaged in critiques of commodity fetishism, so maybe my work’s ‘off the hook’ in this regard thanks to the work of other artists. I don’t know, we’ve seen the commodification of everything from performance to video…. but my work is just as much an American commodity as any other.

J.S.: Were you able to choose with whom you wanted to work, or did Steven Hull assign it? I am curious if you knew whose personality test you illustrated?

I.M.: I couldn’t resist asking Steven Hull whose test results I was responding to, but he wouldn’t tell. I was mailed only Mady Schutzman’s story, so I had no choice, which was fine with me. Situations with limits are really helpful because they let me concentrate on what’s important. As in this case, the drawing was done for me by the story so that I could paint instead of illustrate. Or, if the paintings are illustrations, then so is the non-representational one: it illustrates states rather than things. While I was making this work, I had forgotten that AB OVO’s intended audience was children, but luckily many children seem interested in my work in general. I occasionally wishfully pretended that the test results were Cosey Fanni Tutti’s, because she’s awesome and her work’s important to me.

J.S.: She is quite famous for her music with a band called Throbbing Gristle, a band who was notorious for their confrontational live performances. With their music they wanted to challenge and explore the darker and obsessive sides of the human condition rather than to make popular music. Does this relate to the ideas you have about your works somehow?

I.M.: Actually, I was thinking of a Chris & Cosey⁸ album I have, called Heartbeat, which is really quite pretty, and of a documentation on a Coum Transmissions performance⁹ in an old magazine called, “Re/Search.”

J.S.: I see. Do you compose as well and is music important for you?

I.M.: I don’t really play music anymore; the work’s gotten so visual….but music is a lifesaver isn’t it? But there are graphic languages that can transform sound into vision, for example words, symbols like musical notes or the various ways of signifying the movement of air, as can be seen in comics.

J.S.: Many of your works directly comment on the history of small towns in California. Has any of your work been about Burbank, the town in which you were born?

I.M.: Many of the small towns in my work now happen to be suburbs of L.A., like El Monte or San Gabriel, but in my mythologizing of them they are no longer beholden to fact. I’ve never lived in Burbank though I was born there. My Dad did. Walt Disney was dying in the same hospital while I was being born. Great artist. I heard The Cramps live in Burbank…

J.S.: Earlier in our conversation you mentioned that children are interested in your work, too. I can see why, since the images are accessible to children due to their bright colors and the variety of different surface treatments and materials you use. I guess this is something children find fascinating. They can appreciate the images, without the instant wish to contextualize them. I figure this is evident in A True Tale, 2004 for which, I believe, you used machine-stitched embroidery.

I.M.: This all-thread version of A True Tale showed me that perceiving something pleasurable isn’t incompatible with a painting being ‘dense’ or complex in terms of its relation to the world. It seems that something ‘comfortable’ and colorful like embroidery pleases many viewers, regardless of their age. This painting is also an attempt to have pattern stand in for narrative. The information that motivated it has broken-down into a grid, yet it still represents the narrative because the squares of color were once the sails of a ship in other paintings with the same title. This was an aspect of the painting that I used as the basis for my design- an excuse to decorate.

J.S.: Can you tell me more about the story that motivated A True Tale, and also about Tehachepi (sic), 2004? According to Michael Darling, A True Tale is about “an entrepreneur who made a fortune shipping cats to San Francisco for vermin control”,¹⁰ while Tehachepi is “a story about a high-desert town that experienced such strong gusts that bullets where always diverted to hit the windward side of its trees”.¹¹ When someone only sees selected parts of your work, those stories are not easy to grasp and the images remain rather enigmatic. Do you believe it to be necessary to be aware of all these stories, or is the viewer supposed to make up his own story using the image, blurring the so-called facts even more?

I.M: Deciding how much text to attach to the work has been my biggest problem. In some installations I include written anecdotes: a calligrapher makes ink drawings that are pinned to the wall away from the paintings. This appears to control the flow of information but it really doesn’t explain anything, especially anything in the paintings. I include the anecdote about what motivated the work only in the interest of some kind of ‘full disclosure’- maybe like Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, where he organizes source material that becomes art in its own right, which is something my source material never does. On other occasions, groups of paintings can produce their own or other possible narratives regardless of what originally motivated them. I dislike calling this a ‘narrative’ because that implies a passage of time, as does calling groups of paintings ‘a series’. I work in the present tense. I have grown to trust how color, texture, and composition positively influence what happens with narrative content. This is when I temporarily stop caring what the paintings are supposedly ‘about.’ Nevertheless, I do use information that captivates me in order to motivate what is often time-consuming work. I have found that through repetition and commitment a myth takes shape. The finished paintings seem less dependent on the ‘stories’ that motivated them, because what occurred formally in their creation has altered and determined this narrative. I trust the formal to determine the narrative. When a painting is sufficiently pregnant with non-meaning, or ‘enigmatic’ as you say, the narrative baggage that motivated it seems to dissolve. I prefer to see information break apart in its retelling, as when you just repeated the stories of A True Tale and Tehachepi, to me.

J.S.: Is it possible to characterize your recent works? Where do the motifs come from and how do you find them?

I.M.: This may change, but it seems to me that I work to give form to uncertainty. A friend tells me a story, or I read someone’s account of another place and time, and I begin to respond, not by illustrating with any claim to truth, but by activities that culminate in the actuality of the visual object. Besides the certainty of perceiving a painting that is tactile and/or visually scintillating, uncertainty is the only constant, especially when I’m not just depicting things but ‘states’ as well.

J.S.: The exhibition cycle Imagination Becomes Reality at the Goetz Collection focuses on the multitude of different approaches to painting of international artists. Currently you are participating in a show with a very similar concept called Painting in Tongues. The curator of the show, Michael Darling, wrote about your work: “Morley exploits the unreliability of historical accounts, proffering different viewpoints and perspectives on a given story. While he sometimes uses repetition to suggest the confirmation of an event, he also utilizes disparate representational models, materials, or methods to suggest a narrative rift.”¹²

I.M.: I tell myself I’m responding in as many ways to rumors, tales, and historical facts, but so far this has yielded only four or five ways of working that have turned out to be one. What is depicted is the result of a lack of imagination, because drawing upon personal experience can only produce a limited visual language. I can build and defend a personal myth through repetition and commitment. Even when I produce seemingly arbitrary verbal or visual versions of historical events, the tactile and visual presence of the work becomes the surrogate for something that happened somewhere else. I make artifacts and souvenirs from places that I may or may not have been to, but that hopefully the viewer has, or will visit. I love considering what is peripheral to the supposed subject matter of a narrative. If I am concentrating on the subject of an ex-slave who made a fortune shipping cats from Los Angeles to San Francisco to help with their rat problem, I can depict a pseudo-advertisement for the cologne he wore or the brass knuckles he might have manufactured and/or used for self-defense.

J.S. Is it your intention to illustrate the negligible details of the story or even details which do not occur in the story, just like you did in the works Made in Minn. or Postcard (with Tail Lights)?

I.M. The details that I concentrate on are in the story, but don’t seem important to it. But I have found that if I repeat this information enough and show a dedication to it that is expressed in making the paintings, the information becomes just as important as what was there before I responded to it. Basically, what I’m demonstrating is that sense in painting is a bad thing, but sensation isn’t.

J.S.: How nicely put! Sensation is a very good word to describe the approach your paintings. Not only in terms of the iconography, but also in terms of the variety of different materials you are using. Can you tell me more about the way you work and your motivation to work on materials such as duralene, glass, dyed fabric, dyed canvas, or thread?

I.M.: I often start a painting with a tactile goal before having a conceptual one, or I just want to see one particular color next to another. I had to work on glass because it suspends paint in a way that is more literal than the ways that canvas does. It also reversed my training: instead of lifting light out of dark, a tradition in painting, I’m placing light where it would fall first and then going darker. But glass painting has many traditions, like oil on canvas, and I want to embody them all. Traditionally, the gessoed canvas was not a surface to work ‘through’ but a surface to work ‘on’. By working with dye and thread, I am able to get color ‘through’ a surface that was traditionally opaque. These materials, and the ways that I work, reinforce tactility in perception and have a micro politics all of their own. Colors that are manufactured for use in clothing or other design have baggage that is different from an artist’s paint. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline seemed to recognize this by using sign and house enamel. Sewing machines and thread are also used in contexts that are different from the artist’s studio.

J.S.: So the use of technique and material is rooted deeply in your historical understanding of art?

I.M.: My use of materials was initially a way of avoiding what intimidated me about art history‚ but it’s not anymore. It’s a way of acknowledging uses of color that are just as heroic as its uses in Western European painting: traditions such as the painted environment and utilitarian color. Paint is architecture. It is central to ritual too, but that’s true regardless of culture. Materials are just as much the content of painting as what it depicts.