A conversation between Donald Baechler and Enrique Martinez Celaya Donald Baechler born in Hartford, Connecticut has been for almost two decades one of New York's most important and controversial artists. His works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Centre George Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, among others. David Minnery: Thinking about this dialogue has brought up many questions about both of your work. Perhaps we can start with the sources for the work. What sources do you use? Donald Baechler: What sources don't I use would be a better question. They seem to come from all over the place. They come from a general kind of feeling of nostalgia from childhood and they come from advertising and they come from art of the insane and children's art. Every sort of image that sticks to me as I move through the world ends up somehow informing what I'm doing in the paintings. Enrique Martinez Celaya: And you collect them on your travels also. DB: Yes, I'm always coming back with suitcases and boxes full of things. And maybe about one half of one percent of it actually ends up being used. EMC: For me, the sources for the images can derive from childhood, the everyday, nature, and literature. They are usually very simple images. They are very accessible as things you will recognize immediately. Not usually from culture. DB: Popular culture? EMC: Right. I do not mine popular culture for imagery. DB: You use literature though, that is interesting. EMC: Literature is an important part of the work. Poetry in particular, but literature in general. And a lot of the people that I think about are people in literature. DB: Really? Like who? EMC: Paul Celan and Herman Melville for example. DM: Donald, do you find that writing or literature plays any role in informing your work? DB: That is an interesting question. It is something I haven't given much thought to, but I don't ever really consciously refer to, or somehow I've never been able to draw literature into the visual sphere of what I'm doing. DM: Both you and Enrique have used images of heads, birds, and flowers in your work. How do you address these images, particularly in regard to their almost trite familiarity? DB: I think the word trite is a horrible word. I think it is a pejorative term and I would never use it in relation to anything I'm doing, or with what Enrique is doing either, certainly. I know what you mean, but I think it is a bad choice of words. But I think that, for me, the head is almost always a kind of surrogate for a self portrait, and the flowers almost a replacement for the human figure in the painting. I've made an almost intentional point of not studying botany or not learning what these flowers are that I'm drawing. I buy flowers at the Korean deli on the corner, but you know, I can barely distinguish between a tulip and a rose, which sounds stupid, but it's true. For me a flower has this very convenient, almost human dimension, with the head and the stem and the leaves replacing certain body parts. I think Enrique may have a more emotional attachment to flowers than I do. They seem in your work to provoke a kind of memory or sense of loss. EMC: I really like what you just said about the idea of surrogates for the human figure. I think that is a very useful way of thinking. Heads and flowers are overused, and I am interested in the sort of overload and erosion of these images with overuse. I try to recontextualize them and obtain a simultaneous friction between their familiarity and their new context. Also I often think of flowers, especially tulips, as symbols of decay and fungus. DB: Really. Tulips make you think of decay? EMC: They are padded and they have a skin-like feeling, somewhat morbid and associated with wealth. DB: The whole Dutch thing. I have read a lot of anecdotes about the Dutch tulip economy. The relationship between flowers and economics is fascinating. It is actually kind of unexpected and really hard to imagine. I mean it's hard to imagine it repeating itself in any sense. EMC: In some cases, the painters would continue to add flowers to a painting as the patron acquired new tulip bulbs. Sort of an ongoing painting. DM: Do you find that your paintings bring about a sense of melancholy? DB: I think they do, but I think other people don't think they do. People often end up thinking my paintings are comical in some sense, but in general I'm a melancholic person. Maybe I'm just missing the point of my own paintings, but I believe that I'm conveying some sense of melancholy. Some people agree with me, some people don't. EMC: I think of your paintings back in the eighties with figures and the suggestion of the landscape. Those were powerful and melancholic and almost had a Caspar David Friedrich feeling to them. Not only in the obvious part of the landscape but in the sense of largeness about them. DB: I know what you are talking about. Yes, I was interested in Caspar David Friedrich and the Hudson River School-the figure isolated in the landscape, the figure alone in the world. But then at a certain point I started to want to fill things up a bit more and crowd things in a lot more. So maybe that sense of melancholy went out the window with the empty fields. I don't know. Enrique, your paintings certainly seem melancholic in their use of black and the kind of poetic line that you employ. EMC: The problem with the character of melancholia is that it can completely override a painting. It can completely undermine it, so I try to keep melancholia and nostalgia at bay. I think that is where they are most subversive, most interesting. DB: Hopefully kept at bay. Melancholia evokes awful emotions actually. Awful sentiments in some sense. EMC: Right. But pitting a certain amount of rigidity against melancholia somehow creates an interesting struggle within the painting and refreshes a painting constantly. Paintings that are deliberately serious are often very predictable. I like to find seriousness in unexpected places. DB: I have an attraction to melancholia and also to a kind of ridiculousness and absurdity. I like to mix the comic and the serious into one sort of big soup. I don't know if it works or not, but I think sometimes it does. EMC: I think it works. I think it works in your paintings. DM: The work of both of you contains figurative and non-figurative elements. With regard to the surface of your paintings and the images you use, do you find there's a tension between the imagery and the surface of the painting? DB: I hope so. I construct the sort of surface that I paint on-that I've been painting on for the last ten years or so-to intentionally deflect the line and prevent the line from being too perfect. There is this dialogue going on between two different types of painted elements. One of which characteristically would be the kind of heavy black line and then something naturalistically painted like a vegetable or some sort of species of postsupremacist abstraction. A kind of dialogue between two different types of line making or image making in the same painting. In the past I have said that it represents man's uneasy relationship to abstraction and to the natural world. For me it is a simple desire to kind of churn things up a little. EMC: In your surfaces, you have materials put on them such as fabrics and erasures. Are those part of the constructing process of the paintings or are they premeditated? DB: Some of it is premeditated, some of it is part of the painting. Certainly in my case what you see on the canvas is never how the painting began. There is a lot of doubt and a lot of change that goes on in the process. But there is also this false archeology that I construct to begin with by layering on all this crap on the canvas before I even start painting on it. For me that's just preparing a ground. But then on top of that there is this other sort of history going on with erasure and change and doubt. EMC: I think we share many ideas but I think I have a more troubled relationship with surface and marks. I end up with complex surfaces by pasting stuff, painting over parts as I am trying to get to a better painting. I am willing to sacrifice anything for a painting that will be moving. I do not try to make an interesting painting. I am trying to make a painting that is resonant, and because of that, I end up destroying a lot of work, and the surfaces accumulate some of that history. DB: Destroy a lot of work? You mean you actually destroy them, or you just paint on top of them? EMC: I do both but I was referring to painting on top of them. But I do have an uneasy relationship with all the signifiers or all the things that reference emotion like erasures or transparencies or drips. They only survive in the paintings after a lot of internal reconciliation. DB: I think that's clear in your paintings. There is nothing that looks false in those paintings. I know exactly what you mean. I think maybe that's the difference between a good painting and a bad painting, it is that level of conviction with which the painter can bring, just exactly, what you call signifiers. It's easy to drip and it's easy to scribble something out, but it's really hard to do it in a way that means anything. DM: How do you know when a work is finished? DB: I think DeKooning answered this question once on a radio interview, he said something like, at some point I just paint myself right out of the painting. I feel that. Certainly there are artists whom I admire greatly like Peter Halley who I think goes from point A to point B and then to point C and then he is finished because it was mapped out before he started painting. But for me, and I think maybe for Enrique also, the painting evolves in an intuitive way and just at some point, there it is. It's done. EMC: My feeling about finishing work is similar to yours. I think there is a moment in which a painting feels perfect, and it usually has to do with the moment in which the painting seems truly moving, direct and unencumbered with stuff that is not necessary. I do not usually say intuition but it is a good way to describe it. The painting seems to connect to paintings that I respect and love. DB: Are you saying that sometimes in your own paintings you experience something that's equivalent to other paintings that you know? EMC: Yes. An equivalent feeling, not a familiar look. DB: That's interesting, because I think sometimes that pops into my work as well. EMC: I have this repertoire of paintings and painters that I think about like Giorgione and I think of what emerges out of those paintings. I am not interested in copies nor mannerisms and I have different preocupations than those whom I admire, but I pursue some of the feelings that are in those great paintings. Sometimes that feeling comes from a great writer like Melville. DB: I only think of Melville as maybe the quintessential American novelist and it's interesting that you're attached to him. EMC: I am very interested in American literature and American art. There is something about Americans which I didn't understand before I lived in this country. Americans have a distance that is very necessary to them for surviving with their artwork. They need to create it and then fight against it and there is a no-nonsense quality to it that I enjoy. Take John Singleton Copley and compare him to the English painters of the same period. Their work had fuzzy landscapes and then suddenly you see Copley and you see his paintings having this beautiful direct sharpness. There is no fuzziness, but a balance with nature, an ascetic romanticism. This is true of American literature also. There is, of course, Russian, German, Spanish, and Latin American literature which is beautiful, strong and clear but there is something about the American tradition that I really like. It feels simultaneously familiar and foreign. David Minnery is an artist currently living in Los Angeles.
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