Lisa Turvey on Matt Saunders.
Turvey, Lisa
Rarely comfortable in his own skin, Andy Warhol wrote in 1975 that,
unlike stars who "turn on" and look "poised and
confident" when being filmed, he felt most at ease in
slumber--alone, under the covers, and in the dark, on the way to
relinquishing consciousness. "Where do I turn on? I turn on when I
turn off and go to bed," he wrote, making a syntactic slip that
succinctly describes the animating impulse of his 1963 film Sleep.
Nearly six hours of John Giorno snoozing, its only action a twitching
knee or a rising abdomen, the movie is a protracted proposition that
even an activity as unthinking as sleeping has a performative dimension,
indeed a glamorous one--Giorno recalls Warhol asking him before filming,
"Would you like to be a movie star?"
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Berlin-based American artist Matt Saunders extends the same
proposition in his series of paintings "Slept," 2003, which
take Warhol's film as their lead. Executed in oil on large sheets
of Mylar, these up-close individual portraits of sleeping actors are
gorgeously lambent. The reflective support imparts a baroque sheen to
the surface, but Saunders paints on both sides; faces coruscate even as
they appear trapped under glass, and the effect renders these decidedly
obscure figures--the leading men and ladies of films by the likes of
Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Christoph Schlingensief--mesmeric even
while dazed or dozing. In one painting, Slept (Margit), 2003, his
subject, Margit Carstensen, has skin the color of bruised strawberries.
Set off by an aqueous backdrop of pillow and wall, her roseate glow
makes her look almost radioactive or, to use a phrase of artist Jack
Smith's that Saunders is fond of quoting, "all incandescently
amok."
In "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964) Susan Sontag also
speaks of the incandescent, writing that camp favors "instant
character," where "character is understood as a state of
continual incandescence--a person being one, very intense thing."
To translate a fleeting moment into a statement of self might be
considered a summa for the genre of portraiture, but other elements of
Saunders's practice suggest his camp affinities. There is his
preference for the mannerist--Heidemarie Wenzel's spiky mane of
acid orange, Winfried Glatzeder's wisp-thin neck, Hanna
Schygulla's makeup, overdone to the point of congealment--and for
the epicene: Most of the men in "Slept" could pass for women,
and vice versa. In addition, Saunders is drawn to the out-of-date:
demode interiors, expired publicity stills, and stars whose moments have
passed, if they had a moment to begin with. (His inclination might
partially explain his residing in Berlin, which he has praised for its
"broke-down ethos" and "layers of historical ruin.")
This disposition is crystallized in the pairings in Saunders's
suite of so-called silver paintings, 2005-, in which, for example,
Jean-Paul Belmondo is figured in one work as the handsome young man of
cinematic memory and, in another, as a sunken-eyed apparition in later
life. A 2004 series, "Co-Stars," is out of time to the point
of nonviability: Actresses of different vintages are arrayed at a table
bedecked with ripe blooms and ornate candelabra, attendees at an
imaginary supper based on a scene in Fassbinder's Martha (1974).
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But Saunders's camp is not campy, which is to say that his
choice of subject matter is not precious or parodic, coded or
fetishistic; for him, the mode functions less as an attitude than as a
method. Camp's attraction to the "process of aging or
deterioration," Sontag wrote, cuts two ways: It "provides the
necessary detachment--or arouses a necessary sympathy." Saunders
takes the latter route. The temporal removes that shape his practice are
reinforced by material ones: It's not unusual for one of his images
to begin life as a Polaroid taken of an old movie playing on his
television set, and then be transposed as a painting, a series of
drawings, or matter for video or film. What's remarkable is that
this process seems to make Saunders's subjects more familiar, not
less, so that what he calls "the emotional pitch of the work"
comes through as fellow feeling rather than detachment. His 16-mm film
Double Matti, 2006, is exemplary in this regard. It is a dual-screen
animation, shot from more than a thousand ink-on-Mylar drawings Saunders
made of Finnish actor Matti Pellonpaa in a few moments of Aki
Kaurismaki's 1988 film Ariel. Pellonpaa's career was one of
chronological disjunction: He was just beginning to have big-screen
success when he died in 1995, and Kaurismaki included photographs of him
in a few films made after his death, even crediting him on the cast
list. Saunders's film is also temporally unresolved, as the
animation on the left, more abstract and showing the actor sleeping,
moves ever more slowly than that on the right, in which Pellonpaa is
awake and more in focus. Yet Saunders coaxes another second life out of
the actor: One feels him to be a knowable entity even as--and perhaps
because--his features slide in and out of legibility. The artist is
drawn, here and elsewhere, to those filmic instants in which actors
betray the self behind the character, which may account for the appeal
of Fassbinder and Warhol, as well as for the frequency of sleeping
subjects. In representing these hiccups, and emphasizing such slippage
materially, Saunders succeeds in conveying something of the personality
of those who are, by vocation, impersonators.
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To locate Saunders's output under the now-tired rubric of
"celebrity culture" is thus misguided. His Volker Spengler,
Charlotte Rampling, and Helmut Berger may be distant cousins to
Elizabeth Peyton's fifteen-minute icons and Karen Kilimnik's
postgoth adolescent gamines, and he admires the intentional
artificiality of portraits by Kurt Kauper, who taught at Yale during
Saunders's MFA studies there, but Saunders's fixations are
personal, not mass-cultural, and his own fandom figures as a third
component in the portrait's transactions between subject and
viewer. Moreover, his working methods, if not his themes, are
surprisingly reminiscent of some Conceptual art strategies. For Double
Matti he set himself per diem requirements for executing drawings; for
Udo (20 Takes), 2004, he redrew a scene in an early Udo Kier film more
than six hundred times and then scanned twenty of the drawings to create
a video piece in which they appear in random order. Many of his videos
are text-only and register a Conceptualist bent for listing and
categorizing: One features the name of each character played by the
actors in his paintings, while another, regularly updated work includes
the cast lists of all the films in which Kier has appeared. Saunders is
an undeniably virtuosic draftsman, but he takes pains to challenge, via
a purposeful de-skilling, his own abilities. One series of drawings on
Mylar, all of antlers, was undertaken to "dissociate the way the
ink behaved from a certain, practiced way of drawing," as an
investigation of unlearning what he knew about the behavior of paint on
his usual support.
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Saunders's immediate predecessors are, of course, the
Pictures-generation artists, and like many of his contemporaries he has
internalized their use of photo-based, preexisting imagery in the
service of a practice unbound by medium or temporality. But he refuses
the abjuration of self typical of that art, and closes up the
distantiation on which it turned. In his 1979 "Pictures"
essay, Douglas Crimp wrote that work by artists such as Cindy Sherman
and Jack Goldstein "does not seek the transcendence of the material
condition of the signs through which meaning is generated";
Saunders, by contrast, reveals--if not exactly transcendence--presence
and beauty in the material residue of his own processes. The figures in
the "silver paintings" are painted in reverse on the back of a
sheet of Mylar; Saunders then applies silver paint to the other side
where the portrait is visible, and finally coats the painted parts of
the verso with white paint. Six works from this series, depicting German
actress Hertha Thiele, were shown last year at Galerie Almine Rech in
Paris. She appears fragmentary and spectral, and, depending on the
viewing angle, occasionally imperceptible through the ectoplasmic
puddles and streaks of silver paint; but she is also resolutely there,
embedded in the layers of Saunders's mediation. The pearlescent silver screen functions as a sort of test a la Warhol. It could have
veiled the image and prevented the subject from being seen or known, yet
Thiele is visible and fails the experiment--as Pellonpaa, by exposing
the self behind the actor in Double Matti, failed his screen test. It is
in the depiction of such founderings that Saunders's art
paradoxically finds its force.
LISA TURVEY IS A NEW YORK-BASED ART HISTORIAN.
