Interview with Rochelle Feinstein
by Allen Frame
New York, May 2002AF: There are strong relationships between your recent egg tempera paintings, shown at Ten In One Gallery in New York in March and April, and a lot of work being done in photography now about environments perceived from a distanced, critical point of view — the sense of alienation in banal spaces. Since you work from your own photographs, why aren't you interested in showing them instead of painting?
RF: I wouldn't put photos on the wall because I'm a terrible photographer. All the small paintings shown recently were from photographs done mostly with disposable cameras and of very poor quality. They were initially taken with the impulse to record built environments and to put them on the computer in order to screw around with the photo. There are no people in any of them. None of the environments were from my own house. They were all of places I've been, like Ikea. There, I was interested in the way people put together their packages. It can be so unwieldy because everyone's just buying far too much, and you have these little carts and you have to whirl them around. People make their purchases, their boxes, their crates, kind of stand on these carts — I wouldn't call it vernacular architecture, but it is a kind of architecture of necessity, and it's also very fleeting. You just take a picture of this thing and it's gone. My work has always been involved with ideas of the grid, which is an aesthetic construct, and a plain square, which is a functional one. The photographs that I was taking, like the pop-out video screen on a plane, became clear to me as natural grids that were just in the environment anyway, and I wanted to notice them, to do something with them on the computer that would show me their individual infrastructures. This wasn't immediately apparent to me but came later, both with digitizing and in the painting of them.
Modern Laundry
AF: The color in them is so intense, these reductive palettes of two complimentary colors. Although there is this sense of alienation in the spaces and situations, the effect of the color is very direct, bold, and emotionally expressive. And they're like negatives, with the value unexpectedly reversed, which is unsettling.
RF: I think of them as photographs, I suppose, because the painting process resembled the duo-tone color used in early reproduction, like a two-color offset letterpress print. And at the same time, my working method is equally involved with the history and conventions of painting. The colors really are those used in 14th and 15th century paintings and beyond, but I extracted what I think of as the "hot button", the "money shot", a dramatically intense moment of meaning in a religious painting. Both the Persian rose and cobalt blue, and the Turkish green and cadmium red light, are the colors which describe the Madonna, St. Anne, and so on...so the audience could actually recognize how color signified a particular canonical sequence, as a kind of a visual sermon.
AF: Through the range of environments you depict in this work, from airport to psychiatrist's office, to hotel corridor, it feels as though you are suggesting a kind of psychological narrative, or cryptic travelogue.
RF: I'm not a representational painter exactly — and I really think there's always a will to narrative. People, myself included, always try to make a story out of something and particularly so when dealing with a photograph. It's sort of built into the whole history of "telling" — no matter how many turns photography has gone through, it "tells" in a very different way than painting "tells". With these pieces I wanted to see how I could have a sequence of images that records places and yet not be narrative. These images from snapshots — to me, are non-places, non-ness, and they're things that we don't really look at, which are significant parts of this built environment that I'm really interested in. I think of these places as "built", at the same time I'm un-building them with painting. I want them to be looked at. And I think that their irrelevant, ordinary non-ness can have beauty, and there is some relevance in painting this in order to make something familiar become perceptually complex.
Vertigo
AF: But sometimes staring into non-spaces denotes a preoccupation with something else, something troubling, not the space itself.
RF: In these little paintings — they are 10" x 10", I was thinking of the lower parts of large egg temperas and oil panels from the 15th century. In the upper, larger part is a description of a major scene, but below are the predellas — these small paintings that don't matter as much. Yet they tell you something. They fill in a lot of information. I started thinking of my small paintings as predellas for which there was no larger piece, that sense of deflation of the large. I wanted to see how many I needed to make in order to create something which had a circuit of non-meaning but felt like it meant something at the same time. There was no one story, and that's sort of, to me, the way life is. You go places, you do things, you see things, you throw things out, you're elated, you're bored, you get shit on, you get kicked around, but the story changes every moment you're alive. It's always changing. That sounds very romantic but that's really the way I feel about these things. I'm not interested in narrative per se but I do like your sensing something as troubling within the non-spaces. I hoped that would come along with the staring. I don't care about subject matter but do really care about the ideas, and if you have good ideas, the subject matter will come along. I managed, I think, to work with photos and not tell a story. I'm not that interested in anyone's story — any one story, that is.
AF: Back to the color. Some people thought the paintings looked apocalyptic. Ken Johnson in The New York Times used the word "hallucinatory".
RF: And some people thought "transcendent", which may mean "hallucinatory" to some, or may have the opposite meaning. I don't think about them as transcendent. Deadpan, yes. I think they're grim, ultimately grim.
Warhol Standard
AF: Full of energetic acerbity.
RF: They're funny. They're all that.
AF: Actively off-putting.
RF: Could it be because there's so much that's been eliminated? The down's been taken out of the pillow, and your head's on the brick. There is removal.
AF: Of comforts.
RF: There's one — "Modern Laundry" — just two big objects hanging on a line in Rome. One was a quilt of bold stripes, and the other one of diamond patterns. I could barely see them. They were the size of an eyelash within the architectural grid. Grids were all over the place within these photographs, but when I removed the whole city in the computer I was able to go into the detail, pull it out, redraw it as I eliminated tourist Rome to just make this pink wall and these strangely modernist paintings. To me this grid is the brick you put your head on. When I saw that image the size of an eyelash — in Rome — the grid had entered into the city in a different way; no longer an aesthetic way. The grid becomes laundry. For me, that's a painful place to be, but also very beautiful, and I had great joy discovering it. I don't think the ideals that abstract artists worked with many years ago are those which can be anything other than self-referential right now. Like the painting in the shrink's office, the Paul Klee poster with a tissue box made by Kleenex from their Modern Expressionist series, which is done after a Paul Klee, and to be in my shrink's office and to see the two together, it's a very direct evocation of what abstract painting has been and what it is. It resonates with the world. It's become part of the built environment now. Each of these paintings makes reference to abstraction, so, for me, that was actually the point, poetically, to find a painting within the photograph, because I can't pump myself up to do an abstract painting which just inserts a new meaning/identity into abstraction in order to re-claim or alter abstraction's "meaning". It's boring to me. So I thought, why not look at a photograph and try to get a painting out of a photograph?
Rochelle Feinstein lives/works in New York City and has shown her work in galleries and museums in the U.S. and in Europe. She is also a member of the painting faculty of the School of Art, Yale University.
Allen Frame is a photographer, writer, and curator living in New York. He teaches photography at SVA, ICP, Pratt Institute, and the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City. His book DETOUR, a compilation of images from the last ten years, was published last year by Kehrer Verlag in Germany.
Images are courtesy of Ten in One Gallery