Ten questions from Samantha Topol for Aline Cautis regarding her exhibition No Not:
1.
ST
Let’s start with a general question about the works in this show. All of your paintings are mediated by something, correct? Meaning, there’s no direct brush on canvas in the final pieces that we see in the gallery. Can you tell me how you arrived at that? And, can you explore a bit why you think that is, or what that means for the works as “paintings”?
AC
There are ranges of direct mark making, as well as printing techniques used. There are lots of purposeful blurs between the two making it difficult to tell what is printed and what is painted. There are the works on photographic paper, which are prints of Saran Wrap that I have painted on and scanned in a variety of ways. These are oil paint on ground; only the ground is Saran Wrap on a scanner bed, composited and printed like a digital photograph in a hand-painted artist frame. There is another print, which is the refuse of the first process scanned and then printed directly onto raw canvas, which is then painted from the back and stained. Then there are paintings where paint is applied using monoprint or brush techniques. Often I experiment with different ways/tools of applying paint or color. A banana may be used to apply paint, technically this is a mono print technique. Often, I am using what is in arm’s length distance rather than figuring out the right tool for the job. Other times, I am responding with paint and brush. The hand is always present. There is a performative aspect to being in the studio and making choices between chance and purposeful choice and playing with the implications of each of those choices in the work. The marks and prints operate like stutters and echoes of each other. Painting feels like a strained term in some of the works; it feels like paintings taken through a tape delay effect, maybe a painting nonetheless.
2.
ST
I’m curious specifically about the Untitled paintings – there are different dimensions of surface that are legible in these works, but they are all collapsed into one final inkjet print. Can you break down some of the components, and describe your interest in flattening them all together?
AC
I think there is always an element of collapse in any of the paintings digital or paint on canvas. The kind of collapse that happens which is like the coffee spill that happens when you trip while you walk in a hurry with your coffee in hand. The materials of digital and photographic techniques always flatten images into an uncanny surface. The untitled pieces are about first reducing a painting to a pure surface or skin of a painting. The pieces started out as an experimentation with just applying paint straight to the glass of the scanner bed. The scan of this gives you entirely new colors created by the interaction of light and pigment; one of the most fundamental interactions of painting. I added the saran wrap as a prophylactic to keep from utterly destroying the scanner, but it added the element of skin. When you pick up these thin fragile pieces of saran with paint sandwiched in between them, they are so mysterious and strange, nothing like the experience of a painting yet most of the ingredients. Often made at night, one layer of saran wrap will go through many changes being scanned rescanned – reformulated by pulling apart the layer of one side and attaching it to another piece of saran wrap with another gestural painting or reversing the two halves of the same configuration. Each individual untitled piece is composed of shuffled iterations as well as separate scans – they represent points in time or jumps in time to another piece. When you collapse these together they become a window very different than a painting window, yet somehow using the same vocabulary. The separate images are assembled using intuition and clumsy compositional choices to create a trick reading – much like how a psychic guides the meaning of cards you pull by chance/faux transcendence. There are specific names for the sleight of hand tricks employed by a master cards person; there is a false illusion of meaning by the use of this faux chance. Once again it feels like a reduction to a frail echo, un-synced and out of time – almost mute.
3.
ST
On a related subject, I made a note from one of our earlier conversations about this show that you were interested in there not being any hierarchy, but my note is incomplete. What did you mean by that? And why is that important?
AC
I did say that, but it was a completely misused wording on my part. I really meant I had gotten to this point on confusion, a desired point. Where I did not know what was what, what was trash on the floor or a piece. What was a good painting or a bad painting. I was a mess. I had a studio full of things that I could not make heads or tales of, which I had worked hard to get. It was more a loss of meaning than hierarchy. I think it is important to get to this point so you can actually start to create real meaning. I don’t know what the meaning is, but once you break it down, you have a chance to reconstitute the language you are seeing things with.
4.
ST
What discoveries did you make in the process of making these pieces? What did you learn? It can be anything — about the materials or your working process, whatever. Like, did you learn something you didn’t expect about the way Saran Wrap behaves? Or were you surprised by your own studio trash?
AC
I wasn’t necessarily surprised by my own trash, I was grateful to find a use for it. I have a tendency to save my trash to begin with; people are always giving me things they want to get rid of. I eventually give up and get rid of some of it. It started when one day when I had run out of a specific paint and there was a banana on the floor and thought well I’ll just use the banana. It is a process of reception all of these worthless elements. I have a learned a lot by spending lots of time collecting looking and observing all this stuff coming into the studio and how it gets used. It adds a slapstick element in the studio, everything in the studio is ripe with potential. Somehow the only time I feel like working on these pieces is when I am frustrated with everything else, I felt like trash so I used trash, it is very un-heroic which is what I was looking for.
5.
ST
Did you stumble on, or arrive at, anything while making these works that you’d like to continue developing?
AC
Definitely. I had used images/scans, etc. for a long time in my studio, but not as part of work I exhibited. The processes and materials I just started using are able to combine both of these practices for me mining the tension between image and abstraction.
6.
ST
There are two pieces on floor in the show. Of the two, Carl is a question mark for me – it seems to come from a really different impulse than the other works, not just because it’s formally so different. Like, it points me to something outside the exhibition, but I don’t know what that is. Can you talk about that piece?
AC
This piece has a very personal side and is also pointing to something just coming to the surface in this body of work. They are Thonet bentwood chairs discarded by a friend, who the piece is named after, who refinishes furniture for dealers like Wright Auction. Thonet’s chairs were the first mass-produced industrial chairs. They are ubiquitous. I started seeing these chairs in every single period film/TV and non-period media. They function simply as a sign of mass production. Through the accidental arrangement of these curved pieces of the curved wood pieces there is a relationship that is intuitive and gestural to the pieces on the wall. They mimic the drawing elements that are either cartoonish or gestural; but, often produced through some kind of printing/production. It can be used as a key to read the paintings on the wall and yet also pointing outward to the next episode.
7.
ST
And the other floor piece, cansfoodsregards – I think you described it once as a wall that has been toppled over. You also mentioned that you were interested in it being able to change functions, and transition to having a utility after the show. I think that’s really interesting – shifting from being an art object to having a function. What did you have in mind?
AC
I was thinking about my own frustration and something R.H. Quaytman said in a lecture here in Chicago. She talked about watching her mother’s paintings collecting dust and building a built-in storage rack to the presentation of her own work from the get-go to avoid that disappointment. I like the built-in solution for disappointment within the work itself. It is physical comedy. I think a lot about different forms of prop-based jokes, and how paintings function as the butt of the joke. Because the piece is a flat printed piece you can put it on the wall, it can slide down off the wall, really just go wherever you want or need it. I wanted to build-in a second life for the piece as well as leave something behind for the gallery to enjoy as decor, an area rug. It’s a cynical joke on the value of artwork, but then also something else too. There is a real joy from throwing away the heaviness and weight of the art piece in favor of some bathroom vinyl and make something that could serve both functions well. Also, like a bad joke on Carl Andre it is art you can walk on. There is a lot of junk crammed in. That piece was specifically made from 9+ months of studio consumption; things I ate things I used packaging things, I would ordinarily throw away. I was trying to make sure nothing went to waste even if I was throwing it out. I have a background in architecture so I was trained to always think about the use of things and how form relates to function. I think late night in the studio I wonder well what if I could use this painting to do something else. How many paintings even great paintings just end up as decor in a chic interior showing us only the intelligence and tastefulness of the owner.
8.
ST
I really like that you cited Helen Cisoux in your press release. She’s such a specific character; feminist, intellectual, and experimental in a really deep way with the structures of language. Why did she resonate for you to introduce this exhibition? Also, I’m curious which essay the quote is from.
AC
The piece is the “Laugh of the Medusa” essay published in 1975. I struggle reading her – I have had multiple phases of reaction to her writing, which I have only read in fragments, like almost everything. I have no attention span. The work is made with the same jittery fractioning, exploring a jumbled language of misinterpretation. While I was working on the work for this show, I finally bought the catalogue for the Rosmarie Trockel show and the Medusa’s laugh was mentioned. I had been reading fragments about laughter in Greek culture and loved the Medusa legend from childhood (took out the “on”). I had never actually read this specific piece of Cixous’ writing so it was brand new. I had been having studio conversations with other writers, painters etc. and thinking about my own voice and misbehavior’s and laughter. I felt mute in a sense while making this work. More than any other group of work, this work feels like a reverberation of some inner voice hence a lot of the printing and removal of direct mark making. They operate like the dreams you have where something is happening and you physically cannot speak – if you could speak you could fix everything but you can’t so everything is going horribly wrong. I read the quote and it was like a magical rubber band smacked in my face. It is more aspirational than inspirational. It announces a goal to be achieved that you have failed at so far; but a rally cry for the future. I think I have always failed at anything I have made, but that failure is always something to face and overcome next week.
9.
ST
How do you think these pieces relate to other work you’ve made?
AC
They relate in many ways – they feel like the result of telling iterations of the same until the joke/ the humor is unrecognizable. I did not begin as a painter, so each painting is an iteration of the first attempt to approximate a painting. But, the main thing in common is an interest in color and the relationship of field and line and how those can be used to make meaning within the language and history of painting. But, I am a non-native speaker.
10.
ST
Finally, do you think being in LA has had an impact on your work? How so, if so? And if not, why not?
AC
Yes, absolutely. If nothing else not freezing to death half of the year makes me productive. I am from California originally and since moving here feel mired in nostalgia, even though LA is nothing like the Bay Area/Silicon Valley, which is, where I am from. I have access to distinctly different emotions/spaces/materials/people/pathways here. It changes everything, how could it not. I am always reacting to my environment.
Aline Cautis is an artist living in Los Angeles.
Samantha Topol is a maker of many different things. Among them, she is a co-founder, with Ben Chaffee, of Original Features, which will be presenting new exhibitions and events in the coming year.