A conversation between Amelia Stein and Graham Hamilton, 21 April 2023
painting and photography and printmaking
AS: So, should we talk about photography? We started talking about how photography is different to painting…
GH: Yeah, I don’t know. The only way I know how to talk about photography... I’ve thought about photography a lot, but I’ve always thought about it in relation to painting. Photography always seemed like a mystery to me‚ a mystery in the sense of how difficult it is to make art photography—I guess what that means is something artful. And maybe what that really means is photography that doesn’t have a commercial value, that isn’t useful for selling things or for advertising things or for communicating or documenting events.
Let’s go back to the Robert Russell [article]. We were talking about it on two levels: how it seems wrong to assume that painting performs some sort of inherent alchemy because of paint’s qualities as a medium; and also how you can’t exclude the fact that painting always adds value.
One thing that you and I were talking about briefly is the difference between alchemizing something and metabolizing it. You know, like, painting is often thought of—and I’ve thought of it—as a way to metabolize things... that you can work on and work through an image at the same time as you’re embedding the time and energy and emotional content or experience of making that image into the image itself, and those things are all one. And that’s what’s special about painting. You have this irreducible unit where time and image and experience are all one with the material, and you experience them all at once. It’s like a film scene, in that sense. I think what we were talking about last week with my show is that somehow, with the photographic nature of the work, you have this reinforcing of: there’s the image and there’s the material, and the image is also an image of the material. Photographs are always a print because you’ve always printed the photograph, right? So there’s always this relationship to embedding or resting on the page. And I don’t think I fully understand this yet, but with photography you have the image and then you have the materiality of the image but they’re not one, they’re not the same thing. And that’s the difference between it and painting. And maybe that not-one-ness is what makes photography more in the world, more interested and involved with reality, because the thing that’s special about painting is that it’s always kind of outside of the world. That’s also why I think it’s protected in a certain way, because its otherworldliness—and its very real worldlines—is what gives it this ability to retain and hold value, abstract and fiscal value.
You know, the headline for that article was ‘Reclaiming the Monstrous Kitsch of Dachau’, and I feel like that’s really misleading… or telling. I don’t know what reclaiming means, but painting is often said to reclaim things because you’ve somehow metabolized it in the making, but I actually feel like....
Wait‚ the phone cut out. You were saying, that you somehow metabolize it in the making...
Yeah, the idea is that you’re reclaiming something because you’ve metabolized it in the rendering of the image—because you’re putting it through your physical body, you’ve metabolized it physically, so something is reclaimed out of the image. I think a lot of problematic painting—if there is problematic painting, or whatever—has to do with this idea that something is reclaimed. I don’t know what it means to “reclaim the kitsch of Dachau”, because if you’re referring to the manufacture of these porcelain animals at the concentration camp, maybe kitsch is a way we can describe an experience of these animal figures that wasn’t present at the time, but then the violence isn’t actually inherent in the porcelain objects, only in their auratic relationship to history. We were talking about this so much in relation to Daniel Turner, this confusion about history and the way it clings to objects, and the question of trying to use that historical aura as material to manufacture meaning or value, as if they were interchangeable. It’s really this alchemy question: whether materials have inherent, subatomic relationships to their history and if that means anything.
It makes me think about form. Can you talk about a metabolic process if what you’re doing is using your body as a tool to enact an image that’s already predetermined? If there isn’t any discovery or intuition or surprise in the form... if that’s been excluded to make some sort of point about kitsch through verisimilitude... So, you’re using paint, which is matter, but you’re essentially using your body as a projector. You’re putting this image up there in the form that’s already been decided or given.
Now we’re really into painting in a way that maybe we don’t have to talk about. But then you’re not really painting?
Well, that’s the question. I’m not saying painting always has to be some kind of action painting, AbEx thing…
It’s like, if you haven’t metabolized it, it’s not really painting? I don’t know... Now I feel like I’m arguing for that as a real reality—that things get done or get changed through the process of painting. Good faith, bad faith.
Something I was thinking about with David Rimanelli pulling those performance references out of your work [in his review] was that in some ways the drum pedal was the aperture, but what he’s also picking up on is the performance aspect of making the screens—that there’s choreography in the making... I think there’s a choreography of making with things like screens and photography that isn’t really talked about but is maybe important as well.
I think that’s interesting. I mean, there’s a lot of images in the show, especially the small black frames, of me taking a photo of the screen while it’s being reclaimed, which is the process of removing the hardened emulsion and the negative of the image from the screen. You spray the emulsion with this chemical compound and then you have to take a big brush and scrub it. But there’s a whole gestural experience I’m having of washing this thing. And the screen is in this big water spray trough that’s backlit, so you get a really compelling image. So, of course you’re going to scrub it, but there’s always this kind of opportunity for play or expression—and the difference between the two is interesting.
You naturally make a scrubbing of the thing that’s gestural, and I photographed those. That’s like a—I don’t know if you can call it choreography, but there’s a lot of gesture between, like, the gestures, that gets recorded. And maybe that’s interesting because then these pieces have this more photographic, documentary.... not documentary, but this kind of relationship to translating states within a process, rather than, like, end goals.
I think photography is always in-betweens, you know, you understand a photograph as happening amongst other events, even if it’s staged, even if it’s a still life, or people... now I’m thinking of [Richard] Avedon. If you see photographs in front of these white sheets, you understand that these people are in front of these seamless backdrops or voids, in a sense, that Avedon has brought to Vietnam or the Chelsea Hotel or whatever. You always understand that these people are in a context and the context has been removed, but the context is still all over them. And I think that’s kind of interesting.
Can you say more about that?
It’s a thought I’m having now. Maybe in relation to the show, there’s tons of gestures and motifs translated through multiple photographic processes. It’s an Art Nouveau print that’s been photographed, or maybe it hasn’t been photographed actually yet, it’s been reproduced mechanically through some type of printing process into a book, so it is an original material image, and I’m photographing it with my iPhone or I’m using this app called GeniusScan, which is flattening the image and turning it into a pdf, which is a type of design document, basically, that has a certain relationship to edges... maybe I’m getting into a little too much detail.
These things are layered on top of each other, so you get a lot of in-betweens, a lot of different contexts butting up against each other. But I think with Art Nouveau, for example, you already had that; you already had a series of languages taken out of context and kind of applied or appropriated to different means, on top of each other. I think that’s interesting. But that’s definitely not… that type of rephotographing isn’t research. It’s just this kind of amplification of all the different places you can encounter gesture, or all the different places you can experience form.
And in the work, the bookend of it is, I guess, my experience of making and reading and working through a set of images. It’s funny because—I hadn’t thought about this in a while but I thought about it the other day—at one point I started to think about my work in relation to tourism, and that has its own legacy in art with [Isa] Genzken being this kind of tourist or something like that, but, you know, I wanted to get a bunch of cameras... Tourism has a certain relationship to documentary accumulation, experience accumulation, and there’s always a distance between the experience you’re having and the way you’re recording the experience.
But I really like silk-screening because it feels very natural that you’re having an experience of the making that’s already in a feedback loop to the work itself. Even if you’re making a straight up four-color process screen print, there’s always a lot of built-in relationship between the printing and the image: how it’s pressed and what paper it’s on, the pressure and the speed and everything. It’s different to the feedback you experience when you’re making a painting… I don’t think [painting] is more linear, but it has a different relationship to progress, because you’re moving forward. You can scrape stuff off, but you can never take anything off a painting, really. Whatever energy is there is there. You are moving forward with one monolithic or monomaniacal or... one fantastic world, with each work. And they’re irrefutable in that way. I think that experience leaves a lot less room for openness or fragility. The hermetic nature of painting is very robust. A painting can engender a space or create a space for openness or an experience of openness, but it can’t itself be open, in a certain way. You have all these different kinds of painting that are precarious, and those have a certain relationship to fragility, so maybe I’m way overreaching, but I think the thing that a lot of people have talked about is that even when you have this precariousness in painting, in the end, it’s not vulnerable.
Now I’m thinking of someone who paints on paper, and the things are treated as paintings, and sold as vulnerable, but the way in which they’re postured and made and framed is so fake-vulnerable. It’s very tricky, actually. I don’t know if a painting is only on canvas. It seems that people do feel that way.
What would people call a painting on paper?
Well, they call it a painting on paper. Or they call it a watercolor or something. I don’t know, what do you call a silkscreen on canvas? A painting. It’s something about the substrate. But the substrate can also be a conceptual substrate. You said something before about that what I’m setting up is an encounter with the object. That’s why I put the drum pedals there. Because the boxes have this depictive relationship to surface, water with pigment on top, bronze powder, and when you look at it, it looks like a surface, but you have an intuition that it’s not, probably because you’re experiencing vibration on a level you can’t track. People had this desire from the very beginning to kick the boxes, to find out they’re water, which they must already know. And so putting the kick drum pedals was a way to facilitate the encounter which was already happening, or something like that. I think that’s maybe important to having some relationship to truth or the strength of the work—how you frame it, in all the meanings of that word, is how you facilitate the encounter or the event of the work, which also, you know, has something to do with photography, because you’re facilitating an encounter with some other part of the world or life, something beautiful or something abject, because you’re framing it. Because you’re indexing it.
Is silkscreen better than painting at showing something complex or relational about a surface? I do think painting reads as a monolithic image more often than people would like to admit…
When you’re making photographic silkscreen, when you make a print on a transparency to block the screen that you then expose, often you’re using a dot raster. Even if you’re printing block colors or gradients, they’re printed in a dot raster, so in a way you always have space between the image and the surface in the image. The whole image is created just by the adjacency, or proximity is a better word, of the image to itself. The color, the dots. The image is made of dots, the image is rendered by the proximity of the dots, but it’s all on the page, and the page is always there through it. Without the page as a negative or second expression of proximity, you wouldn’t have the image.
Can you say more about that?
I don’t know, maybe that’s too far. Because if you have a transparency [on its own] there’s nothing behind it. If you have one side of the image, you still have the image. I was just thinking about seeing the page in this white and blue and yellow piece [Untitled (2023)]. A lot of the prints are on Chromalux, which is this thin, glossy white photographic paper that you can do four color separation screen-printing on and get a purely photographic image, that you would experience as a photograph. There’s a blue print on there and the print is a dot raster, so it’s like, if you look closely, you can see, in what should be a solid and gradient blue, a dot pixelation, a dot breakdown. And I think that’s an interesting part of it: you see that ink interacting with the negative space of the page and creating the image.
I think it’s good that we are getting the more technical stuff into these conversations because when I was working on the text for the show you were really not wanting to talk about that. Remember?
It’s funny because I since had a conversation with the gallery about the work and they wanted to know more about what the work means, and the part that was so generative actually was when I ended up describing to them how all the different pieces were made. And that’s kind of where their understanding of the work came from. It’s interesting because I’d been insisting on the meaning of the work coming from the formal expressions of adjacency and rhyme and space and stuff, like poetry….
Yeah, well, that’s what I was saying to you at the time: that how it’s made is so much a part of understanding what it is.
Well, I think there’s something there for me where I have an anxiety about feeling like the work is process-based abstraction. But that’s the nice thing about silkscreen: silkscreen is process-based. It’s not that as a motivation or a painting language that you’re working under, it just is that as a tool, in a certain way. Yeah, I mean, we can talk about the process. We can talk about different pieces. One piece that has a lot of different processes is the first one you see when you enter the show, this brown star piece [Untitled (2022)]. I’ll just tell you how that one is made: the paper is a fabric paper, a fiber paper, like a washi, so it’s kind of cloth-y, different from the Chromalux paper because it’s an absorbent surface.
The big image, which I think looks like it’s printed on top, is this black-to-brown gradient of what looks like a drapery of stars. I made a photograph of a large shower curtain, then I took the image into photoshop and I cut out the information in the stars. So now the stars are just shapes of stars, but the drapery of the cloth is all around them. Then I made screens that were life-size—so I guess we’re proceeding from the front to the back of the image—and that’s a photographic image, but it’s missing some information, which makes it both flat and having depth at the same time.
So there’s this kind of richer brown set of stars and stripes, basically, curling stripes, and this is another shower curtain, but with this one I’ve taken this clear shower curtain that has printed stars on it and put it directly on the light bed. In silk-screening you have a silk screen, which is literally that: a fine piece of silk stretched around a metal frame, and you coat it on both sides with photosensitive emulsion. Then you make a transparency, like with the first one I printed, on a large printer in clear plastic acrylic. You print a greyscale image in a dot raster. Is this following so far?
Yeah.
Then you take this transparency and you put it on a really large light bed, so the image is now going to sit between the light bed and the silkscreen. You put the silkscreen on top—the light bed is also a vacuum table, which sucks the image and the transparency together so there’s no space between the two where the light could creep around the image and expose the photo emulsion—and you expose it, then you take the silkscreen and wash it out. The parts of the photo emulsion that haven’t been exposed to light because they are blocked by the image on the transparency wash away, and the other parts are cured by the water into a hardened blocking thing.
That’s what I did with the first layer. But with the second layer, I took the second shower curtain and used it as the transparency itself. It’s already a kind of negative to the first shower curtain because the stars are dark and the background is clear, and I put it on top of the light bed and twisted it. You can see that the stars are where the print on the fabric is blocking the light from getting to the silkscreen, and then the stripes are actually physical folds that have also blocked the light. It’s this amazing thing where you get this incredibly graphic image made out of the actual physical folds of the plastic shower curtain. If you look closely at the brown stars, you can see the weave of the fabric.
Then behind that there’s like two other layers. There’s a set of leaves that I put on the light bed and exposed directly, there’s this black shape that’s a seed pod or piece of bark from a palm tree that also was exposed manually, and another set of gold stars which were cut out of a print of the first image—so the stars that were removed digitally have been made into a positive again in paper, which I just piled up on the light bed and also exposed manually.
So ordinarily, would you, or “one”, only use one of those processes?
I think in a typical or traditional photographic silkscreen, you would do more like a four-color separation. You’d separate the CMYK or red, yellow, blue, and black into different screens, and you’d print it like that. You can also do block printing, where you’re not making rasters but you’re making, basically, stencil screens, and then you still print red and blue and yellow on top of each other to get the colors you want. That’s still a multiple color process. Typically, I don’t think you would use all these materials. I was looking at this Andy Warhol book and I was like, all this is, is a purposely messy underpainting that blocks out color shapes where the different things in the photograph will be, then on top is one layer—or maybe they’ve printed it a bunch of times, but it’s one image in black. And that’s where you get all the information. What you read as depth across all these colors is just the depth created by this one photographic grayscale image.
Why is painting assumed to be the more complex expression when it comes to process and material?
I don’t think it is.
Or the more vital one.
Yeah, the more robust. It’s not assumed to be, it just is. I think that’s what that Isabelle Graw book [The Love of Painting] was about. That the vitality of painting was not only not going away, but it was becoming more important. It’s just durable, as a value form and as an expressive form. And that’s the thing, paper is not durable. This guy came into the gallery, and he was like, yeah, it’s cool that these are all prints, because prints are just so useless. And I was like, well, what do you mean? And he’s like, it’s antiquated, there’s nothing you can do with them. And I was like, but that’s my underlying understanding of art in general: that it’s useless, and that’s the whole point. That’s where it finds its agency and its value in our culture. I was like, what do you do? And he said he made paintings, and I was like, well, don’t you understand that as useless? And he was like, no. And yeah, maybe you don’t understand painting as useless because you’re expecting a return… Not to be overly romantic, but I do think that good art doesn’t expect a return in that way, or not exactly. Maybe I don’t believe this, and maybe we shouldn’t go into this too much, but I do think there’s something about precarity being at the core of things, and that being important.
It's interesting to think about use or uselessness because silk-screening is an artisanal technique.
Well, yeah. The artisanal aspect of it is a different… That’s the funny thing. Aren’t prints experienced to be extremely decorative? Maybe that was his relationship to uselessness, because prints read even more as décor.
I don’t know if it’s to do with how prints inherently read, but I’m thinking about how when silk-screening is used make fabric, you can make this huge amount of yardage because of the tool—you can replicate the pattern rather than it being, say, hand-painted.
Whereas I’m not using any of that to my advantage. I’m not using the reproducibility of silkscreen to my advantage. At all.
These are one-offs, right?
Exactly.
Why did you want to make them one-offs?
Because I don’t want to make serial work. I don’t even know how this is related, but I’m not interested in progeny or the afterlife of my work after death. I don’t know. Seriality… it just doesn’t feel as interesting because I think what I’m after is the experience of the iterative-ness of experience. All I’m after is how it feels. To be alive, or whatever. Producing repetitions, that’s just a chore.
It's gearing the work in a different way.
I mean, a lot of the prints you could remake. You could make an accident and then make that print a couple times. And that would be smart. And better, probably, in some ways. Then they’d be cheaper, but you could sell more of them. But then you’d have a different relationship to dissemination and presence and encounter.
It does come back to the Peter Schjeldahl line about [Wolfgang] Tillmans dropping the glass through the live scene, that that’s where the photograph is made.
Yep, yep. That’s the totality of the photograph. That’s why they’re photographs. It sounds kind of silly and meta, but yeah. A photographic process embedded or captured in a photograph. It’s an index of the moment. It’s a shadow of the event.