Charles Esche: The question of decoration inevitably comes up in your work, but it can also seem to trivialise it. For me, the decorative forms in your work seem to be in tension with themselves. There are ideas of decadence and an exploration of visual excess - for instance: how far can it go? At the same time, the works' lack of longevity is in line with minimalism's puritanical mode. So is the decorative something you want to respond to in the work? Do you recognise that tension in it? And is there a way of speaking about the decorative without falling into anti-intellectualism or ideas of visual pleasure?
Richard Wright: I would first of all like to challenge the connection between decoration and triviality. This is an attitude that goes back as far as the Reformation (if not before), and that we find manifest most recently in the confining ideology of early modernism, which tried to purge itself of forms that were seen as excessive or not essential.
Obviously, I reject the idea of pure art. The fact that the forms I might use are somehow trivialised or lowered by this way of thinking is, for me, precisely what makes them usable. But I would like to go beyond terms such as 'visual pleasure', 'decadence', etc. that imply something onanistic or empty. I would like to go beyond the whole culture of this way of thinking - I would not call the façade of Cologne Cathedral or the ornamental art of Islam decorative, I would call it ecstatic.
Looking at this from a slightly different position I would say that ornamentation and abstraction are like two bodies with the same head. When one is present the other is also near. It can depend on where you are standing. For me abstraction is not just a form of representation, it is a reality - a manifestation of the profound geometry of thinking. The problem is how to discuss this kind of thing in the work without the pomposity and the rhetoric of absolutism. And so, yes, I tend to operate with debased forms. Perhaps I would prefer to call them standard forms. There is something about this notion of the emptied - the decorative as you call it - that has a kind of anonymity (not belonging to anyone). To me this makes it available.
It has been said that one function of art is to defamiliarise our perception as it has become automatised. But if a language is to be kept alive (and I don't just mean playing something out) the standard has to be reinvented. It must, if you like, come in disguise (Satan as man of peace).
CE: I'd like to pick up on this notion of the 'availability' of certain empty forms, such as decoration. Of what does this availability consist for you? Is it that these forms are essentially clichés, which in being presented as such, are ignorable, and then only at second glance taken seriously? The idea of the double take is what I'm referring to here. To look and look again. Or by 'availability' do you mean that these forms have such an excess of meaning that they go beyond readability? I think these two notions are different: the first is quite a traditional way of encountering contemporary art; the second, the idea of excess providing opportunity, is really new and might suggest ways of dealing with information or other forms of contemporary overload.
RW: Although these two ideas are quite different I think they are connected because the first one leads to the second. I think a form is always available in the first sense - it is an archetype that is somehow used up and therefore harmless or unloaded. This definitely has to do with the word, but it is also related to cliché in symbolic terms. This idiomatic material is somehow collective (the product of us all) and also free (separate from us all) - this last point has to do with it being (or appearing to be) abstract in the sense that words are abstract.
But there is no such thing as dumb material in art and especially not in painting (actually there is no such thing as abstract material). Intentionally, or by chance, the standard is reinvented and this is perhaps where your second proposition comes into play.
I have spoken, at times, about the inadequacy of words like 'gothic'. The gothic for me is not so much a style as it is an effect. I would almost say it is a type of reality, but certainly it has to do with the bringing into reality of the material in a very particular way. (I think for me this specifically involves a certain use of shadow as form.) It is this effect that sparks the overload which goes beyond readability. What I find really interesting about your idea of excess is that it touches on the involuntary aspect of sight. As we know, sight is a sense. That means, for me, that it is somehow a part of the body in a way that is different from a faculty such as speech - and unlike such a faculty a sense can take up the meaningless. We see the invisible, by which I mean we see more than we know, and here is where it is possible for that excess to go beyond meaning - or to come to life as meaning again and again.
CE: I'd like to direct this discussion to the relationship between architecture and embellishment. Sometimes the work seems to serve the function of revealing the qualities of the architectural space rather than the other way around. This seems a very modest way of working, especially given all the effort that goes into it. Do you then see the work as essentially performative, in the sense that it exists for a particular place and moment? What should remain afterwards, if anything? Is it a memory of the work or of the changes to the space?
RW: Regarding this idea of the performative, part of my intentions at the beginning were to try and emphasise the importance of the action over the object. But as you indicate, the effort involved suggests something of a contradiction here (though I'm not sure that this effort is actually visible). I do think that the space between works is often more significant than the works themselves, and that the delivery or placement of the work is about allowing the space to take hold (therefore about something that is already there). But I do not want the work to seem to be staged - I want it to appear to be abandoned. I think this is less about 'modesty' than about wanting to avoid a position of authority in the exchange.
I am always puzzled by the need of the tourist to continually take photographs - these things seem, to me, to contain nothing of the event. But what should remain afterwards is a critical question. I suppose the truth is that you can't take anything with you except perhaps yourself. In all this there is definitely a resistance to signification but not necessarily to meaning.
CE: The idea of only taking yourself touches on a much larger issue that is somehow present in all your work, even if it is difficult to discuss: the role religious imagery, even spirituality, plays in your work. It is tricky to stray onto this territory because it is closed to us in so many ways, but since you have already mentioned church architecture, islamic patterning and Satan, I would like to ask how you see your work in relation to religious iconography. Is it a quotation of a form that has now, as you say, become emptied, or is there something else here - more linked to actual religious desire? In many ways, I see this religious desire to be one of the most significant elements of experience threatening the new world order. In all its forms, religious desire is both very present in human life and not part of the understanding of logical, self-interested, capitalist markets. Maybe now, rather than the opium of the people, it has become the sword - though it always seems to be in the 'wrong' hands.
RW: My impulse is just to answer yes! I think it is an extremely difficult question. As Levi Strauss said, 'every civilisation tends to over estimate the objective orientation of its thought and this tendency is never absent'. These things are not as far away from us as we think they are. It would not be too much of a leap to suggest that the situation in the Middle East right now is as much a continuation of divisions that erupted after the collapse of the Roman Empire as it is about oil, etc. It is a shock to realise that this way of thinking continues. As you say, the sword is always in the wrong hands.
Religious iconography is something that has been played out and emptied; on the other hand, it is also something that explicitly refers to the presence of 'religious feeling'. I am not talking about something around us that is present but denied. To go back to Levi Strauss's point, I think most of our reality is unreasonable and this is part of it. You hint at a potential resistance in religious thought and this is definitely something that interests me, but it would be far too simple, and I think meaningless, to become a 'religious artist'. When I look at Barnett Newman's work I don't think so much about what he said, but I also don't just see the work as form. Likewise, when I look at Cologne Cathedral I don't just see Gothic architecture, I see ten-thousand voices.
CE: Can I ask you what you think the main task of the artist is today? You deliberately avoid an explicit engagement with the political or the social in your work. Yet you are critically engaged in the difficulties of painting because of its way of being consumed and marketed. Your production seems to imply that there is a problem with painting on canvas that is more than just a formal one. Could you explain that problem and how you see it played out in your work?
RW: Almost everything that I have made in the past decade has been destroyed as part of the conditions of its production. I consider this to be a more profound political gesture than playing out the overt opposition 'fuck your beliefs'. I am well aware of the fact that there is no such thing as revolutionary art. The only truly radical move for the artist is to give up art. The question is how can you negotiate with a system in a way that is necessary. I am not against painting on canvas per se; the problem is the ease with which painting is absorbed into the market, which of course facilitates its easy consumption. There are too many unnecessary objects.
Kandinsky said something like 'how many who sought God finally remained standing before a carved figure'. What is important here is not whether or not God exists but whether or not God needs to exist. What the artist must do today is what has always been required - and that is not to tell lies. In my terms, if an encounter with a work of art allows you to maintain the values you had before that meeting, then it is unlikely that work will sustain any use-value in the long term.
The point for me is not to change your opinion from white to black, but somehow to prolong the engagement with the work. The work for me is not like a ring-pull that's discarded once you get to the beer. I once saw the Tarkovsky film Mirror. After I left the cinema I had the feeling that 'outside' time had been altered and that the film was continuing. I think that's the best you can get from a work of art.
