something was there because it was dense, but what difference does a light casting a shadow do for some of the paintings I’ve made? The monochrome became a severe editing process. It was a way of being critical about making very tight pictures with considered surfaces. Can you make a good painting with one color? OBRIST: What role does drawing play in that? When I was in your Bronx studio last year, what really struck me were your large-scale charcoal drawings. PACKER: There was a time when it felt like drawing was in the way. I couldn’t paint to save my life. So, I would draw an image and the drawing would feel so complete that the idea was already realized. It would prevent the painting from ever occurring. So I stopped drawing so that I could actually focus on painting. It’s still true that the drawing removes possibility, but it makes the paintings more pointed. Drawing doesn’t just translate into painting effortlessly. For me, drawing is almost like a primary language: you can start scribbling before you put sentences together. It’s really direct; it’s easier to approach an image through drawing. When I began making small paintings, it was to spite people who said that small paintings were studies, even though there are many examples of stunning small works, by van Eyck for instance, that are not. But then I started to think of drawing as this thing that could do something unique and immediate that painting would have to work so hard to achieve. I wanted to challenge myself to approach drawing in such a way that it could argue with a painting. Typically, my drawings aren’t images that become paintings. They’re like this counter-practice. Even if it’s the same image, I see them as being completely different. Our exhibition is going to be one of the first times where I’m really emphasizing that relationship.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I was wondering to what extent you feel politics enter your painting?
JENNIFER PACKER: I feel a kind of responsibility. Painting can go where photography cannot. I think my task as an artist is to be more attentive. Everyone should be attentive, but I ask myself to look and reap the benefits and witness pain with that consciousness. I think it’s impossible not to talk about politics, even in the most casual way. I’m thinking about Black representation in portraiture. I’m thinking about walking through the Met and looking at the Rubens, or any other large paintings of that nature, which are about a decadence that was funded through procuring riches from other parts of the world in questionable ways. OBRIST: You mean the painting of the colonial age? PACKER: Yes, of course. I feel a responsibility for things that I haven’t even fully named yet. I was thinking about the exhibition “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today.” Maybe 50 to 60 percent of works in it I’d never seen before and it was contextualized through the politics of the day. The fact that Black women were relevant and had meaningful social status is otherwise completely unclear within the context of French painting without shows like that. You are highly unlikely to learn this fact from any major museum collection. In 1794, France abolished slavery, then reestablished it six years later. French institutions changed the names of painting titles so you wouldn’t have known that the models were actually Black, or that their titles read as offensive today. Institutions, through their insistence on master narratives, neglect or intentionally withhold essential representations or counternarratives that would help us better understand history and the impact of BIPOC folks. These gestures seem to benefit those who are invested in ideas of their own innocence or who suffer under scrutiny or transparency. Institutions also tend to distinguish, hierarchically, artifacts from art in ways that are extremely problematic, especially when many of those “artifacts” have been acquired through colonization or other culturally destructive or transformative acts. The artifact becomes a shadow to the more significant
narrative of art history. The fact that there are so few representations of Black women in the Met at all proves this resistance or fear of acknowledging the importance or centrality of Black women to the success of the colonies and European interests in general. OBRIST: Some of your earlier paintings, especially the monochromes of figures in an interior, verge on the abstract. There are many different forms of abstraction—formalist, political, social. What’s your relationship to this, and how does this figuration-abstraction oscillation occur? PACKER: People think representation is more believable or real than abstraction. But van Gogh’s paintings don’t look real. I’ve never seen a painting that looked real, but I’ve seen paintings that felt real. I’m interested in something that runs through the work despite what the image is. Morandi, Cézanne and FantinLatour do this for me. It’s something happening that builds the picture into what it is, but it isn’t reliant on the picture itself. I think de Kooning is one of those artists too. In my second year of painting, I was heavily invested in abstraction. I was really into Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman. I was completely blown away when I saw Newman’s Stations of the Cross in DC. It impacted the way that I thought about space and being enveloped in a painting. At Tate Modern, the Rothko room is insanely intense. Early on, I made some faux abstract paintings. They’re mostly representational derivations that were over-reductions. I’m really interested in Greenberg and modernism, and this idea that all that matters, all that’s true, is the material. You have the surface and everything emerges from it, as if everything is just a low-relief sculpture. In the past, artists were trying to get all the brush marks out of their representational paintings. But it’s still a low-relief sculpture that happens to be a picture. So I usually use the word “dissolution” to describe what others might call abstraction. I’m interested in the breakdown of something that pretends to be something else: the representation of the simulation.
This extract is taken from an interview first published in Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing, (Eds. Melissa Blanchflower and Natalia Grabowska) to accompany the artist’s exhibition at Serpentine, London (19 May - 22 August 2021) which tours to Whitney Museum of American Art (29 October 2021 - 17 April 2022).
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