In Conversation: Charles Gute Interviews Matthew Northridge

“We come up with rules for ourselves, so they are ours to abide or ignore. Most of my rules have to do with establishing as few steps as possible in realizing an idea.”

 

Courtesy of Matthew Northridge.

IN CONVERSATION: CHARLES GUTE INTERVIEWS MATTHEW NORTHRIDGE

Charles Gute: In addition to your more labor-intensive sculptural works, you’ve been working on a series of smaller collages that seem more related to drawing. There’s a recurring landscape motif that feels almost like a travelogue—like they’re snapshots. But of what?

Matthew Northridge: Each collage is an installment in a larger compendium titled The World We Live In (2006-2012). The photographs that serve as the foundation for these collages are culled from a variety of books on the natural world. These images, carrying the color profiles of the era in which the books were published, are transcendent, at once illustrating a very real place, but also creating a new one. Their often strangely tweaked colors further romanticize the landscape. Devoid of even the occasionally stray hiker or tourist, they are solely ours to observe. I think with any captivating image, there’s the possibility of a type of passive travel. My images are no different, but for the fact that the landscape is consistently obscured by various structures that inhabit the foreground. These constructions resemble barriers or billboards, often dilapidated from the effects of time and gravity. They are pieced together from found paper, where the accumulation of marks and wear carries its own history.

CG: So there’s an element of time travel, which I guess is true in any travelogue. You’re looking back not just at a particular place but at a particular point in time, except that here the chronologies are even more stratified. You’ve got the found landscape image, which, in its manner of printing evokes a pre-digital era. Then there’s the old paper that you arrange on the surface, which has its own history that is now somewhat obscured by its being repurposed. And finally there’s the point in time in which you manipulate and fix these elements together according to whatever is going on in your head that day. Do you see these pieces as more “expressionist” than the sculptures?

MN: In the broader sense, yes. These collages, though no less informed by some of the same decision making, are much more quickly executed. The scale and the immediacy of the material allow me to react in a less deliberate way. There’s a lot of play involved. I find that this offers a certain balance to my more labor-intensive work. I also find myself developing ideas from these, as one would find in a sketchbook.

CG: You mentioned gravity. I notice that a lot of your sculptural works are held together just by gravity or by virtue of the parts fitting together with a sort of precise tongue-in-groove craftsmanship. Is this a sensibility?

MN: Sure. I’ve found different ways to accommodate the idea of the modular composition. The most basic approach is to allow parts to notch, sit atop, or lean on each other. This is merely a variation on the most traditional ways to install art—hanging a picture on a nail or putting an object upon a pedestal. This dependence on gravity is what allows that picture to eventually come off that wall, that object to be lifted from that surface. This is such a fundamental relationship that it goes unnoticed. By drawing attention to gravity, I can draw attention to the relationship of one part to another. This is the case with Twelve Ladders, or, How I Planned My Escape (2010), in which each subsequent miniature ladder leans on another, contributing to the force that pins an image to the wall. Craft is an important aspect of this. When done properly, it ensures the least amount of visual interference, so you can concentrate on how it functions rather than how it’s made.

CG: Are you saying that the ladder piece in its current form—assuming I believe you when you say the ladders are not affixed to one another and it’s their cumulative weight that holds up the image—somehow will have a different reception than a visually identical version in which the ladders are glued together and the image is attached to the wall with a hidden loop of tape? I think about this a lot when I look at historical works that presuppose an implicit process or “truth to materials.” For example, is that Serra really only propped up or is it actually anchored in some tricky way? A similar question comes up in my own practice when I establish a set of rules for making a work, but then there’s a temptation to fudge the rules in a way that the viewer cannot possibly know about. What’s your thinking on this?

MN: It could very well be received the same. “Visually identical” is, though, much more subjective than you might think. We all have varying capacities for skepticism, just as we do the ability to sense subtle clues in presentation. Either way, the same reaction may be elicited. I think an even more important question is how “breaking the rules” changes the artist’s relationship to the work. We come up with rules for ourselves, so they are ours to abide or ignore. Most of my rules have to do with establishing as few steps as possible in realizing an idea. Fixing together those ladders would be adding, in the end, an unnecessary step—and one that may be detectable. It would be a different piece to me if that were the case, despite the fact that it may appear identical to the original. How would this effect the way I regard my own work? Tough to say, but my instincts are that it could lead me in the wrong direction.