Investigating Interiority and Inferiority
By Adam Mendelsohn
Adam Mendelsohn: I understand that you spent your childhood growing up in Westchester and that this has provided the source material for the majority of your work over the last several years. One wonders, looking at your paintings, whether as a teenager your position was as an outsider looking in, or from a more free floating position – one where you were traveling through both the worlds you depict as well as your own world.
Michael Wetzel: I think both writers and artist will attest to always feeling like being on the outside looking in, and that it is through entry that we gain our information. I always enjoyed being invited over to anyone’s house, especially to those that contrasted my own.
AM: My friend recently had the honor of looking after two young con-artists from England. They were here in Manhattan pretending to be royals. Roving around New York City’s premiere hotels and restaurants, the kids flexed some accent, flashed a signet ring and did just fine. Morally, I find it difficult to take sides in this. For some reason, this story really resonated with your paintings. Any ideas why?
MW: Maybe it has something to do with self-mythology, the Ralph Lauren syndrome. People always seem curious about how I personally fit into my paintings whether my own history matches the world depicted. I see the lifestyle I use as source material symbolic of a larger American condition, in that way I am a participant.
AM: Previously you’ve touched on this notion of "Arthurian tribalism" – which is a fantastic and accurate way of describing what I feel is a particularly East coast style of upper class. In your last show with John Connelly, we saw many paintings where these billowing, make-shift war tents made from sharpened spikes and flowery sheets are pitched in cultivated estate properties. In Big Tent, which is your grandest war tent so far and is in your current show, we see a multi-level, blood red fortress. Can you explain what you mean by Arthurian tribalism?
MW: Arthur unified tribal England. England represents America’s prehistory. In imagining the unraveling of the American republic, it seemed fitting to take it full circle. England, as you know, is so highly romanticized in much of America that I wanted to question how far, given the chance, that emulation could go. Also, in terms of the paintings, the patterned fabrics afford the opportunity for me to play with space. The patterns flatten the field, reminding the viewer of the surface of the painting to contrast with the illusion of deep space. That pictorial tension is used as a means of disorienting the viewer into entering further into the painting.
AM: The emptiness of the rooms you paint is tangible. This is partly due to the way you control the light and partly due to the psychological construction of the spaces. They are inviting but also slightly sinister. In Red Skies at Night, which is also in your current show, we see a grand stairwell and through the windows to the garden, we see a bunch of men viciously clubbing each other with polo mallets. Because all of them are good-looking, well-dressed young men (though they tend to all look alike), it creates a false dignity and sort of portrays them as worker bees fighting to protect the hive. What I like about this painting is that it really hams up the interiors and points out how material trappings can be so misleading, that there is so much assumption and social conditioning tied up in these mixed up, borrowed ideas of lifestyle.
MW: Painting has a history of being used in pursuit of ideals. We’ve talked about its application in terms of material and lifestyle ideals. The borrowed lifestyle is another desperate attempt to create a sense of perfection. Red Skies at Night talks about that attempt to save face in a crumbling world. You are invited upstairs before you discover what is happening outside. I’m interested in presenting spaces that are ‘just so,’ where every thing is well-placed and finely selected and yet simultaneously failing to please. I use the pursuit of an ideal in painting to describe the pursuit of a questionable ideal in life and how, in turn, that distorts the painting.
AM: I know that you have completed a series of paintings where you were looking at fox hunting. I continually argue with people about this because I put forward the idea that fox hunting is absolutely tied to an aesthetic that may in fact be more important than the actual event, or is at least inextricable from the event. The aesthetic of a foxhunt is no accident and is physical evidence of something that has been refined over many hundreds of years. Every aspect of attire and action is the result of each generation tweaking and preserving. I can appreciate why people would be willing to fight tooth and nail over it. I mean, a foxhunt would not be the same if the riders were dressed in overalls and carried baseball bats though that might be a more accurate depiction of what is really happening.
MW: This was the first time I consciously used style as symbol. It was not so much the grand tradition that interested me but the way in which it is represented and commodified here. Specifically, the soft grey skies and green fields of the genre – and it’s countless knockoffs that are meant to evoke wealth and tradition in places that don’t even participate in the hunt.
AM: For me, you’ve targeted a precise type of "Americanness". It is the same demographic that sold Europe via Stanford White and Richard Morris Hunt and have sort of entrenched themselves in a dislocated idea of tradition and ancestry. And yet, that is a very specific American identity.
MW: It has to do with a part of the American identity that has nothing to do with cowboys and melting pots. Something more in lines with provenance and a postcolonial sense of identity and severed history. I’m interested in those who maybe suffer from an inferiority complex from being American, which is seemingly contradictory, but does exist out there.
AM: Finally, I was interested in how immaculate the surfaces of your paintings are. I wonder if, even by going over every inch of your paintings with a magnifying glass, I would find a single strand of hair or fluff.
MW: What you find is a sampling of New York city dust and soot, caught like a fly in amber. I don’t recommend it.
