Dale Adcock in conversation with James Cahill at TJ Boulting.
The following transcript is from a talk that took place between the artist Dale Adcock and arts writer James Cahill on 3rd April 2013 at TJ Boulting. The talk was held on the occasion of Dale Adcock’s solo show ‘Ratio’ which ran from the 13th February 2013 – 13th April. They discuss Adock’s practice and works, as well as moving through the issues concerning contemporary painting.
James Cahill – Good evening everybody, well Dale I think it will make most sense if we talk about these paintings in turn because even though they have certain stylistic attributes in common they are also very singular against one to the next. So if, for example, we begin with this, this took a few years to produce this portrait of a man and woman.
Dale Adcock – Well the whole show has taken about 3 years, those two works, a lot less, maybe 5 months.
J – This piece, ‘A Portrait of a Man and a Woman’ is interesting because it has a very specific point of reference, or point of genesis, which was a painting you saw in the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, can you say a little bit about that?
D – If you walk into the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery and go up the stairs, turn left then go all the way down to the room in the back where the Arnolfini marriage is, if you ignore that and then look right there is a double portrait by Robert Campin. I was captivated by these works. I always knew that I wanted to make something about these paintings. It’s something about your involvement in a triangle of looking, the man is looking into middle distance and so is the woman and you are looking at him and her. I made drawings of these paintings. I then imagined what it would be like to extrapolate the drawing or take the drawing out of the page, make a lozenge out of it, and balance it in a shallow space. All the works in this show are mediated by my imagination. I don’t use photographs.
J – I think it’s interesting that you don’t refer to other models in your studio or photos. You don’t have any particular reference when you are working it is, in a sense, unmediated in that respect. It sort of derives straight from your imagination which I think is quite unusual in contemporary painting not to have…
D – Perhaps, I am not sure if it is or not, it’s just the way that things have worked out.
J – and that idea you mentioned just now about a triangulated viewing is a very interesting one in Campin’s work but then also in the work of Jan Van Eyck, his contemporary. In the Arnolfini wedding you have this idea of the circular mirror compressing and then reflecting back space in a way that sort of tries to give you a 360 degree view. This is of course something painting can never literally do but at the same time you seem to be exploring in these bulging, convex, mask-like shapes. The idea was Cubist really, of seeing it all at once.
D – Yes! All of that! No that was good! I could not say it any better.
J – What about the oval shape, because I don’t think Campin’s work was oval. How did that come about?
D – They are small and rectangular, I think sometimes artists can be beautifully pragmatic. The ovals were in my studio for a long time, maybe about a year. I thought they would make a work together. I think the oval really lends itself to portraiture especially and an idea of Cubism. You find a few Cubist painting which are ovals because you get rid of the problem of the corners, you can just start in the middle and work out. It just lends itself perfectly to the idea of…
J – …the idea of portraiture is an interesting idea because in most contexts a portrait is of known person, or at least it can be sort of theorised who a portrait might be if it is an old painting…
D – I love the Campin’s because you don’t know who the sitters are its just a man and a woman…
J – I like the idea that they become like stereotypes
D – The stereotypes are what I find interesting. Interesting or not before these paintings I made two paintings that are much larger than these which were about making two things look very similar which were different. Then I started these and I tried to make them different, like the male and the female and the more I tried to make them different the more similar they became.
J – I suppose in that way you are reflecting something portraiture always was and historically always ends up doing, which is adopting, rounding back to a formula or casting things in a fairly paradigmatic light. I mean it is interesting that these are anonymous and stylised to the extent that they are. They are very much like masks rather than anything else. When I looked at these it makes me think that however penetrating a portrait is ever thought to be it is only ever a facade or a mask and you seem to have reflected that quite well here.
D – If you take paper and fold it it would be empty, that is why the eyes are black, as soon as I painted them out they looked like urns or chess pieces and it just felt right. I have never made two paintings that were so easy. They were just dying to be made. It was beautiful the whole thing. Well I think it was anyway, that’s the story that I am telling myself today. I am not sure if that was real, I am not the best person to ask.
J – I think the results are superb and I think one thing I would like to mention again is how architectural these are, I mean on the one hand they are like folded paper origami but they are also jutting forms, diagonals and rectilinear shapes, they are very architectural and I think this relates to the other paintings as well. Can everyone see the painting behind us sufficiently well? This is called Validator, and this, rather like the one there, has a strong architectural element. Particularly from here its redolent of post-modern architectural folly as you might see in the MI6 building or even a James Bond film representation of Ancient Egypt it has that sort of architectural folly element about it.
D – Definitely, I have become more interested in form and volume over the last few years., I find it challenging to make something look three-dimensional.
J – You don’t make sculpture do you? Yourself?
D – No, I am completely two dimensional in my work, i make paintings and drawings. Years ago I saw a reproduction of Picasso’s Bathers, two heavy figures running across a beach. I thought this was an enormous painting and then we went to the Picasso museum and saw it, its not so big! But it was fascinating that the figures could have so much volume and I think in a similar trip we saw Rogier van der Weyden’s ‘Deposition’ those figures were also very volumetric, taking that body off the cross in a really shallow space.
J – and van der Weyden is of the same era as Campin and van Eyck
D – I think Rogier van der Weyden was Campins teacher or the other way round, I am not totally sure….but I liked the idea of putting the figures in a very shallow space, they are pushed towards you so you have to deal with this emotional scene. That is why I have used a shallow space, so you have to deal with it, It is not an impassive painting. It’s not advertising.
J – Lets talk about the title of this one, ‘Validator’. Am I right in saying that you devised that title first and then the picture afterwards, sort of validating your own title with what you then produced.
D – The genesis of this painting was talking to artists and hearing myself talk about the theory around my work, It sounded like validation. One of the good things about being an artist is that you can embody that and you can make that Freudian monster. When I imagined what that figure would be it was a cross between Blake’s Newton, The Aztec God of Death and the Roman god, Janus.
J – and Blake’s Newton, , is a very deliberate and important point of reference here with these compasses which seem to form part of this totemic figure, they are a sort of quotation, for want of a better word, from William Blake’s print showing Isaac Newton planting a set of compasses over a scroll he has laid out. The whole symbol of rational, scientific, validating…
D – I find it fascinating the way Blake embodied different ideas in different characters, like Urizen the architect within Blakean mythology and his opposite in the fracturing of the godhead, Los which is the sol or sun spelt backwards, he is the forger, imagination, the head and the hand. The head thinking, the rational and the hand hammering, heart beating, that’s why you have the hammer in the bottom of the painting. The whole body it is inseparable…just like the paint from the canvas…
J – To go back to what you were saying before about trying to thrust something into the space that very much applies to this piece over here called ‘Tomb’, just thinking back to when I have spoken to you before about this piece it has a number of points of derivation,. Obviously, when we look at this the first thing people will think of is Minimalist sculpture and Donald Judd but it also had a less likely provenance didn’t it? Weren’t you interested in a small maquette you came across at the V&A?
D – I came across a small waxwork maquette in a sea of small sculpture. I looked at the tag and it was a slave by Michelangelo, a maquette that he made while he was thinking about Julius II Tomb. It was going to be a huge sculptural project which was then scaled down over time. As soon as I found this out i knew i wanted to make my own tomb. When I imagined my own Tomb I saw a kind of a totemic structure of cases with heads in, cases with bodies ,cases with heads, bodies… you can build the structure out of this modular device. When I imagined that I imagined it turning like a clock or a grinder. That is why the heads are facing in different ways, it’s turning clockwise. They were just going to be heads and then I realised that the heads were going to be psychopomps, because when you die you are going to arrive at a place you have never been before so I thought it would be useful for somebody to be there to show you around.
J – Just to explain this idea of a psychopomp is an ancient Greek….
D – I think it is a Greek word, I think the literal translation means usher of the soul.
J – The God Hermes in some instances was known as Hermes phychopompous, as in Hermes the one who will guide you from the world of the living to the afterlife. It seems to me almost beautifully perverse that you have embedded some of these very poetic, arcane, esoteric references and there are, of course, plenty of others which we can perhaps get onto. The interesting figure of this Donald Judd style sculpture, when you think about minimalism being a kind of non-referential materialist sculpture, yet you have embedded it with symbolic references.
Dale – Yes…
J – What are some of the others? You have one at the bottom there which I think is a reference to Moby Dick? Is that right? The sperm whale?
D – Yes, but from the top it is the Lord of Mictlan, the Aztec God of death, at the top, or Smiley as he is known to his friends, next Anubus the Egyptian psychopomp, Hermes the Greek and Mercury the Roman counterpart and then it becomes more inventive you have the idea of the Grinder, second from bottom and then the sperm whale at the bottom. When I imagined the structure turning I imagined it grinding the bodies, that is why they entropically degrading as the painting goes down. You have flesh and then fleshy tendon, and then muscle and tendon and then bone and then you see the bone of the hand is being sucked back into the painting, re dispersed into the universe as it were…this painting took a very long time to make and I could talk for a long time about it, I could go onto Osiris and Isis, the male and female figures alternating in the caskets and the creation myth in Egyptology about his death and re making and how he became Lord of the underworld…
J – Before we depart from some of the thematic references here one of the stories as well which I think you mentioned is compressed within this, was that of the noble savage Queequeg in Moby Dick, is this right he carves designs onto a wooden coffin.
D – It’s my favourite coffin story and my favourite tattooing story…I think about halfway through the book Queequeg becomes very ill and it looks like he is going to die and they ask him if he would like anything and he says could they make him a death canoe, a coffin. So the carpenter on the ship makes him a coffin, puts it next to him and Queequeg lays in it and tries it out to make sure it is the right height. He then goes back to his sick bed and remembers that he has some business to do back in port and decides not to die, much to the annoyance of Captain Ahab. In his convalescence he copies his tattoos, which were tattooed on the island that he grew up on by a prophet of his land onto the coffin. It’s fascinating that he doesn’t understand the tattoos but is still copying what is on his body back onto the coffin…Yates put it beautifully he said ‘you can embody truth but never know it’, incredible beautiful thing to say.
J – In a sense it seems a very appropriate metaphor for painting itself in some respect, whether its portraiture or paintings of any kind as it cannot really escape its own paradigm, which is the beauty but also the bane of it. It will always need to some extent reference its own traditions and precedence. Which is the same idea of translating something existing on your body whether or not you immediately understand it. It’s like learning at school in another sense. That idea links quite nicely back to this and that idea of trying to validate things. Its like a Latin motto on a building as a sort of a means of validation and I think also tattoos have Latin on them in the same cases. What are your feelings about the medium you use, you mention you don’t use sculpture. People sometimes say I paint because it does things that nothing else can do is that true in your sense? Does painting sort of articulate what I just described more than anything else, this idea of reaching back into the past and compressing everything together, collapsing all these precedents together and saying something with that?
D – I am not sure, that is a lot of questions… maybe I will take one…I can’t make something that is not self-conscious. I can’t make something that is not conscious of its past, of its of its medium, I cannot make something for instance, and not be very conscious of Cubism and all these things. I am also very conscious that I can only speak about these things now, I can only mix Robert Campin and Donald Judd right now, I couldn’t have done that in the 15C. I think that is something that painting does very well…I told myself that I wouldn’t make any generalisation, that was a massive generalisation!
J – Sometimes painting itself…a lot of contemporary painting is trying to strike at something very generalised. Let me ask you about your drawings, as I think something we should do en masse is go next door and look at your works on paper, but before we do, perhaps it is useful to say that your drawings are not studies in the conventional sense or are they?
D – The drawings are not a study for the paintings it is a much more fluid relationship. Some of the drawings do turn out to be studies, because I was thinking about them at the time and some are observations and… you’ll see.
J – Well, before we do that does anyone have any particular questions about Dale’s work or should we all go…
Audience Member – I would like to ask what the backgrounds mean to you? The stories you were telling, the myths are quite earthy and yet the backdrops are nowhere in particular. It doesn’t want to be rooted somehow, they are all kind of a non-space and I wanted to know what you thought about that.
D – I would go back to van der Weyden, I like the shallowness of the space. It feels important there is a neutrality to them as well. I would describe myself as a mostly figurative artist, I make a lot of heads and sometimes they are attached to bodies and sometimes they are not. The backgrounds tend to be quite neutral, cold so they recede, it’s a practical approach to a painting problem. The work behind me is the only one I have thought more about the figure and ground, i imagined it underwater, the abstracted rays of light coming through the water.… does that help?
AM2 – There is that theatrical thing as well in the shallowness of the space, it’s the thing in space. There isn’t anything behind it there aren’t any trees there is not a room, there is nothing else to say.
AM – I was thinking more psychological reasons, in terms of isolation.
AM2 – That’s true.
D – I was going to say something more about it being really three dimensional and very flat at the same time. The paintings, they can be very three dimensional and very flat at the same time. You get that with a minimalist Gestalt, the idea of looking at something and being enveloped in it then realising you’re in space looking at it.
J – Maybe we should progress into the next room to look at the drawings? Am I right it saying they take us on a roughly chronological trajectory round the room?
D – Yes, it goes 2012, 2011, 10, 9 and I think the ones on your left are around 08 09
J – As in ‘The Validator’, the underwater totem is it true that you will come up with titles first and then the drawings, there is an arbitrary relationship between the titles and the drawings.
D – The best way to think about the drawing or the way that I think about the drawings is that it is an extended sketchbook practice. I was making sketchbooks and making drawing this way and then notes and titles the other way and then sometimes the crossover between the title and the image was just incredibly serendipitous so I formalised it. Sometimes the title was made first and then the drawing or vice versa but there is no direct correlation between the title and the drawing, but it always works, because that’s how I guess language works.
AM – Do they all have titles?
D – Yes
H – on the back
J – there is a sort of table on the wall over there, which has all of the titles.
H – this one here we have had framed so you can see on the back. Every single one of these has the title in ink on the back.
D – Sometimes its abstract words, this one is called Leviathan, and how could it be anything else? It just works beautifully and sometimes its very spooky like the drawings behind you of a tree with figures in, they are called the long fall, that gives me goosebumps…
J – These, unlike the majority of the others, are a sort of triptych. Is that something that is more common to your drawings than it would appear in the rest of them or is this fairly unusual.
D – It is fairly unusual. Drawing for me is like a diary. I have my studio and paintings then at home we have a table where I have my watercolours and inks.
J – That idea of writing a diary is very appropriate for these. Compared to a lot of contemporary drawing which is very arty and self-referential and self-consciously intelligent. They don’t seem to be overly self-conscious rather, like the paintings, they are a product of your imagination that is not necessarily fashionable or common in contemporary drawing or painting. There is a certain amount of humour in them I think.
D – Definitely
J – Am I right in saying that some of them have direct…
D – Do you remember the story I told you?
J – Well the one with the stripy penis…what’s the story there?
D – The figure with the stripy penis, the title for the drawing is, the Sabre Tooth Cunt Dream. The idea for the drawing came about when I was on a train with a poster of Donald Trump with his big head with a big comb over. I think the premise of the advert, was ‘come to my conference and I will make you successful’ …It’s just grotesque. I thought fuck you! I am going to disrobe you, so I did. It made me really happy. It really did. To just give him the same stripe of his hair to his penis it was just…
J – What about this one down here which is sort of an allegory about auto-eroticism this man somehow sort of Hans Bellmer style copulating with himself.
D – You have chosen two drawings that have made me look psychotic. This drawing is an example of what happens when you piss me off. I was working with a guy, a long time ago, everyone got fired and everyone was bitching about this guy and I said ‘leave him alone he is a good guy he has got a good heart,’ Then years later I heard what the fucker was saying behind my back. So I thought ‘go fuck yourself’…This is one of the beauties of being an artist, you can throw a malediction into the void . I think serendipitously the drawing was called ‘internal logic’, i saw him recently and felt good…
AM – Does it look like him?
D – It kind of does… my friends that know him were like… is that…Ha! The abstraction of the title and the drawing affords me the ability, on the one hand to be very personal but on the other hand to be very abstract. Some titles are words that won’t leave me until they are written down, some observations, they can be song titles or book titles and the images also vary from something that is a very specific, like the drawing on the back left , the man with the child on the lead with wings? I saw them at a train station. Sometimes it’s just working paintings out, this one is the grinder, which is the second image from the bottom in the Tomb. It is all these things, it is a broad idea of drawing.
J – So while these aren’t studies as such they have points of intersections with the paintings. You were doing at the same time. Just one remark I wanted to make about this arbitrariness about title and work which sometimes results in a nice philosophical connection and at other times is maybe more disjunctive. In a way it’s more illustrative of a disjunction between your thoughts and your feelings and our reception of the work. Because without the privilege of this explanation we wouldn’t necessarily, we wouldn’t know the story of ‘go fuck yourself’ and necessarily with art it is going to be like that so it seems to me that in that decision it is quite random.
D – I like that link, it reminds me of a Sartre story about naming…I can’t remember which book it is, but there is a child who is an orphan and he goes looking in his parents bedroom for evidence of his existence. He is rummaging through his parent’s drawers and his stepfather walks in and says thief! He then describes how happy he is because he has been named.
J – And I suppose not to be overly obvious parallels with the idea of naming and therefore validating and the seeming authority that carries as well as its arbitrariness. I think it was Edgar Allen Poe who spoke about the nothingness of a name opposed to its authority and its certainty. Well thank you Dale, does anyone else questions about the drawings?
AM – I just wanted to ask one thing about the size they are obviously all exactly the same but over four years. Obviously that is conscious.
D – Artists are pragmatic people sometimes, i was given a large ream of paper that is exactly this width but that long, so they each get cut that length. So when I run out I will change size or I will have to pay to get them cut down. I like the size its sort of skinny A4, it would upset me if they were A4 but they are not.
J – One interesting concluding thing that it would be nice to dwell on is the title of the show Ratio, how did that come about. It may entail lengthier explanation but…
D – That is the one question that I didn’t want to be asked. If we were all in a room together two or three years ago and you would have asked, what’s your solo show going to be called? I would have said, Ratio, because it was always going to be called Ratio and you would have said why and I would have said I am not sure. I think it is becoming clearer as the show goes on. Apart from the obvious nod to William Blake, he said something like ‘if you see the eternal in something than you will see the eternal if you see the ratio you will always see the ratio’, it is also like damar and turpentine, a ratio, one to another. It can be an interesting way of describing a whole thing by separating it out into its parts. But, is the whole indivisable? Maybe the whole is describable only in its parts?
H – What I personally learnt more about the word Ratio was that it wasn’t actually the usaged in that way; it was more in relation to rational thought. I was interested in learning when we were planning the show together, the idea of Rational thought especially in the distinction between your drawings and your paintings because your paintings I personally see them as much more rational, compared to the drawings which are much more, not irrational, but unconscious and free because you do them every day but you only do one or two, three paintings in a year. That’s what I was interpreting but I think its interesting…maybe say a bit about your paintings and drawings, someone came in today and said is this the same artist? They always say that!
D – I don’t think about it. The connection between my life and work and the connection between the paintings and the drawings are so centered within me there is no differentiation between the paintings and the drawings apart from the fact that they happen in different locations..
AM – If some of the drawings, if you can call them drawings, some are in watercolour and ink, I see them as very organic, they come from more of an organic process, they make one a day and your thinking about all sorts of things and that comes out in your drawings.
D – The drawings are definitely more diary like. Today I was thinking about two paintings that Robert Rauschenberg made called Factum I & II, they look very similar, until you look at the small differences in splash and brushstroke…Which is more expressionistic a Jan Van Eyck or a Jackson Pollock? It takes you far enough away from what you are looking at to make you realise that what you are making is a language. There is an idea of the language of painting, like a splat meaning something expressionistic, In fact, the more uncomfortable truth is that it means the same.
AM – I think you go through that process of making work, perhaps a lot more is revealed in the drawings, all of the mechanisms of your mind, references to things perhaps less formulated than in the paintings because you think so much about what is going on in the painting. It is very meticulously put together…
D - I look at it that I am only reflective like a lens; Reflective of the stereotypes and the issues that you come up with in paintings and drawings. I think painting can be of a more loaded iconography than drawing necessarily…I never had that problem.
AM – I know Dale quite well, and for me both aspects of the work seem to make complete sense to me. I think some of the drawings even go as far as to become a 3D or something that is vaguely Cubist.
J – I think certainly the ratio of the two works very well and the decision to hang the drawing alike that came as a result of the space.
D – Completely, I saw the side space and that main space and it was always going to be paintings and drawings on the side.
J – I get the impression that ultimately you feel that the distinction which is beloved of curators particularly between drawing and painting and works on paper is not actually a particularly important one.
D – I don’t know if it is important…
J – I think that distinction is beloved of curators because painting is a problematic thing, not very fashionable whereas drawing seems to have a protected status
D – I am very linear, I meet artists who are very volume based but I am very linear, I think the drawings and paintings are linear.
J – I think something that we haven’t discussed is while you are actually making these with the with brush and canvas there are elements of line drawing, you use pastel as well as crayon.
D – Yes, the paintings exist as a kind of chalk outline for a long time, I have learnt to leave it for a long time, just in that state.
J – Well its good to hear you are not perturbed by the status that I think painting does suffer from, a kind of beleaguered status. There is perpetual talk in certain quarters of its belatedness…
AM – That’s a bit 90’s
AM2 – I think that’s a little bit…when we were at college doing our MA if you said you were a painter there was a bit of…now it doesn’t have that…
J – But the people you were at college with are probably defining the taste of here and now.
D – My favourite retort to paintings belatedness, is that its done pretty well for the past 40,000 years.
J – To me it has the sort of comparable death of the novel mantra that was fashionable for decades and decades and has never been substantiated apart from being a sort of intellectual theory.
H- on this note the painting issue is something we are going to come back to later in the year with James and some other painters so it is to be continued!
