Unnatural Resources

Photo by Albrecht Fuchs

Luc Tuymans in his studio in Antwerp, Belgium, August 2007

Photo by Albrecht Fuchs

Luc Tuymans in his home in Antwerp, Belgium, August 2007

Chris Marker Ai Weiwei Manet Narcisse Tordoire Peter Weiss Thriving Arts Districts Threatened With Demolition in Beijing The State of Things: Brussels/Beijing / Center for Fine Arts Ai Weiwei Won’t Appear at Frankfurt Book Fair

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The developing Polaroid was more an idea I was attracted to on a pragmatic level, to underscore the way an image appears, so I don’t really consider it a film piece. It’s different. It’s more like an object. Film is of course something that’s still in my gut, and maybe that will concretize at some point in a project again, but not in the immediate future, because film and painting are hard to combine. Both are very intense, demanding activities.

What exactly do you mean by “hard to combine”?

Well, they are more or less similar. Some might argue that they are diametrically opposed, since one is a moving image and the other is still, but that’s about the only really significant difference. Painting is the process of manufacturing an image, of approaching it, and filming is that too. Both are unlike making a photograph, where you are in the moment. You have much more time when you’re considering and approaching an image than you do with photography, which is why I often say I could never be a photographer. Because of all this, filmmaking and painting’s interference with one another becomes too strong, so I couldn’t pursue both, with the two different types of attention they require, at the moment.

There are some obvious relationships between your work and film, but I’m interested in hearing more about the role certain concrete cinematographers have played in your thinking, and about the affinities between your work and films by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and Peter Weiss.

Syberberg was someone I encountered in 1978 first by reading the script of Hitler: ein Film aus Deutschland [1977], then seeing the film on three consecutive nights on television—a black-and-white one if I’m not mistaken. The fascinating thing about him is the way in which he, in a manner of speaking, dreams history. The way he approached the war, and in particular Nazism, was very risky for a German at the time. He was the first German to imagine what it could mean to step into the mind of Hitler, without just crudely picturing him. It may seem a bit dated now, but it’s important because he starts to unravel the whole of German fascism from a cultural standpoint. A lot of what I was thinking about at the time ran parallel to what Syberberg was working through in his movies.

Weiss is an entirely different story. Those works are short films, and there the affinities lie more on the formal level of making images, the often awkward and impossible angles that are taken, and especially the way the image is often masked or cloaked, even though he’s dealing with moving images. Also how he succeeds in marrying them with a type of immobility—which was already visible in his earlier prints and paintings, of course. You can really see a painter at work there, which is also the case with Eraserhead [1977], by David Lynch, who I wasn’t surprised to learn also started out as an artist before moving on to film.

Weiss often makes use of a type of Chinese box system in his works, putting narratives within narratives, which is presumably something you can relate to.

Yes. It is a way to be able to work on the level of understatement, which I think is very important within the visual. It is something that, because of an oversaturation of images that already circulate within the media, and a media that now often largely deals with itself, is increasingly rare.

I wonder if the way Chris Marker approaches memory and history through his cinematography interests you. For example, are the images of mating monkeys in your series “Exhibit” a direct reference to his Sans soleil [1982]?

Yes, definitely. I think Marker was one of the most important cinematographers of his time; in fact he’s still active today. And in a strange way there are links that can be made, albeit indirectly, with my work and the art films from the 1960s of which he was one of the main proponents. It saddened me to read of Michelangelo Antonioni’s death, as he was one of my favorite filmmakers because of his treatment of time and history, where narrative elements fold in on themselves, are turned upside down, and are contextualized through processes that work on an explicitly visual level.