Unnatural Resources

Next spring Luc Tuymans is turning 50. In lieu of a midlife crisis, he is preparing for two major surveys of his work in 2008, at Haus der Kunst, Munich, and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. Perhaps in anticipation of those shows, this past summer he organized a smaller, more personal exhibition in his hometown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp. “I Don’t Get It” featured etchings, lithographs, source Polaroids, films, and even a designated smoking room where footage of his murals screened—but no paintings. Modern Painters asked his compatriot Yasmine Van Pee to talk with Tuymans in their native Flemish and translate into English his candid sentiments on politics, process, his curatorial projects, and his critics.

Yasmine Van Pee: You’ve just made a substantial donation of your Polaroids to the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp [MuHKA]. Why did you choose to do that, and why now?

Luc Tuymans: Well, because Polaroids are working materials for me. They can’t really be sold, at least they aren’t intended to be, so I thought it would be fitting that they be put in the care of an institution. They were donated with an archival function in mind. The timing relates to my exhibition at MuHKA, “I Don’t Get It,” but that is conceptualized more broadly than it would be if it were solely centered on the Polaroids. Its concept clusters around the ephemeral. As you know, no paintings are shown. Instead the show includes prints and multiples I made to raise funds for several nonprofits, and also more-unique projects using print as medium—lithographs, a series of six-color etchings called “The Temple” [1996]. There’s also a smoking room, which I created so that visitors can smoke inside the museum, rather like those designated rooms in airports. Inside that space there’s documentary footage of several of the murals I made which have now been destroyed.

I tried to create chains of recurring images in the show, not so much concerning myself with the idea of being straightforwardly didactic, but rather giving viewers some kind of a way into the process of painting.

It struck me that “I Don’t Get It” also seemed to allow for a certain literalness. I mean, being able to see for example the Polaroid you used to make Drumset [1998] and compare it to a print version of the work itself seems to run counter to the more oblique nature of most of your previous work.

Drumset’s the most literal example from the show. It’s a monochrome, strongly abstracted, and plays more off the color nuances of the Polaroid, all the hues tending towards violet. There are of course other paintings that can be directly related to the Polaroids shown, because I use them as working materials. There’s a work in the exhibition referencing that working process. First I built a scale model of which a Polaroid was taken, then others were taken of that image, and then I made the painting based on those later Polaroids.

The thing I find fascinating about Polaroids is that they are akin to the way I paint: I start off with the lightest color, then work up to higher contrasts, and in a way Polaroids do the same. A Polaroid is not really a photograph, you see, it’s a liquid in which the image appears. One of the attractive things about them is that they are, in essence, tied to an extreme randomness; you never know exactly how one is going to develop, whereas with photography you retain at least some control. And it’s precisely this inherent element of loss and possible failure that I value.

Presumably filmmaking also lends itself to “possible failure.” Most people aren’t familiar with your film work—I know I wasn’t before I saw Feu d’artifice [1982]. Could you talk more about that?

Yes. Its title, which means “firework,” again refers to the ephemeral. It was shot on 16 mm film and documented a performance which was in itself the culmination of two or three years of working in Super 8. It was filmed in collaboration with a friend who’s an actor. We created a sort of tableau vivant inside the Royal Galleries [a covered walkway bordered by a row of columns] of the Thermenpaleis, right on the beach in Ostend, which was a public performance—I think we even organized breakfast afterwards. The whole event lasted a little over half an hour and was timed to coincide with the sunrise. It was a collage of different elements: my own texts, fragments of writing by Joseph Conrad, Fernando Pessoa, Michel de Ghelderode, and others, but also film footage shot by my friend and me, which was projected on a screen in the background. Everything was condensed so that it had a theatrical feel. The performance was explicitly conceptualized to concretize, then disappear again. Feu d’artifice contains a lot of influences that I feel might provide a radical way of rethinking my work now.