Interview with Curator Phaedra Siebert
Ben Whitehouse talks about his painting and
the evolution of The Revolution Series
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio
March 15 - April 25
Revolution Still Lifes
ArtChicago
April 30 - May 3
Perimeter Gallery, Booth TBA
Grand Rapids Art Museum
June 4 - August 22
GRAM and Ox-Bow
Perimeter Gallery, Chicago September 10 - October 9
Ben Whitehouse grew up in England. His father, a film director, introduced Whitehouse to the craft of image-making early on. He earned a Master's degree in Fine Arts from the University of Chicago. Landscape was not a popular subject when he was in school. Nonetheless, it was landscape that captured his eye and imagination. Whitehouse has spent nearly 20 years representing the experience of landscape. His output includes traditional paintings, experimental-format paintings and high definition 24 hour digital videos that capture luminous, continually shifting images of the land.
In June 2008, Ben Whitehouse visited the Arkansas Arts Center in preparation for the exhibition Ben Whitehouse: Observation. Phaedra Siebert, Curator of Drawings at the Arkansas Art Center, interviewed the artist. What follows is an excerpt from their conversation.
PHAEDRA SIEBERT: I'd like to talk with you about your art practice generally, and then I'd like to get into your head a little bit, so I can understand where you are coming from. Tell me about your upbringing in terms of the arts and visual culture.
BEN WHITEHOUSE: Dad was a film director, so I grew up in the cutting room watching miles of footage being wound and rewound and cut and examined. Both my parents were very interested in painting. They were also very interested in Freudian and Jungian theory. I grew up in Hampstead and Freud did much of his important work in a nearby house so we were surrounded by that ambiance...there was a lot of interest in how painting could be useful...images were not thought of as decorations. They were meaningful, thought provoking things.
PS: It sounds like you have always thought of yourself as a painter first, is that correct?
BW: Yes, although I didn't want to be an artist ...but I was compelled to make things. Art found me. As a student I felt it was extremely important to understand all aspects of art and painting. I knew I wanted to understand everything well enough that there would be some depth to it. In other words, I didn't want my art to look the way it looked by default or because I couldn't do anything else. And then in grad. school I started to think about landscape. It seemed to me that nobody understood light anymore. I could see that my experience of light was different from Monet's experience, or from Sisley's experience or from Turner's experience and I thought there was merit in thinking that through.
PS: Have you always been interested in landscape?
BW: Yes. But here's the thing - if you intend to make a painting to convey authentic landscape experience, the one thing you notice immediately is that everything is moving, evolving. Every grass blade is moving, every square millimeter of this earth is thriving: it's potent with life. So you want your mark making, you want your paint to do that. Every square millimeter of it has to be enlivened with light, gesture and mark. My large paintings may look highly detailed but actually I was not as interested in description as I was in making the paint do something that stood for that texture or that movement or that moment.
PS: So you were never a photo realist painter?....
BW: No I was always about direct observation....I used big brushes and made little marks with them to try to convey an agitated sense of natural phenomena. The one thing I did take from impressionism was the idea of an image that disintegrates up close but coheres at the right viewing distance...which is why I thought the digital realm would work well for me because of the way pixels (in plasma screens, for example) are constantly refreshing all the time. Its an idea I hoped my paintings would evoke.
PS: That leads me to think of people like Baudelaire and other late 19th Century critics. One of the ideas they threw about was automatic transmission -- that the energy of the artist cannot help but translate through the paint. I am wondering if that plays into your thinking at all.
BW: Yes, I see what you are getting at. But my conscious effort was always to get the energy of organic nature into the painting and me, the artist, out of the way as much as possible...acknowledging your point that one probably can't fully do that. The marks on the painting were meant to be subsumed by the experience of landscape. I didn't want to be the subject and the more I got out of the way the better I felt I conveyed the experience I was after. In the new paintings - in the Watch Series - I have made a real effort to make the hand disappear so that each panel functions like pure light, glowing on the wall. Because the subject here is vapor, atmosphere, light condition. The panels are made by hand -- that's inescapable. And you can see the hand in them. But I wanted the hand to be as quiet as possible so that the panels could function more like light.
PS: So now I'd like to talk a bit about the relationship between the handmade marks on canvas and the analog in the digital landscapes.
BW: The analog for me is in the way pixels refresh themselves constantly. The image seems alive. My father was a movie director but I didn't expect to be in that realm myself. That happened to me because I wanted to solve a problem. I have always thought that good art resulted not from a desire to 'make art' but from a genuine effort to solve some kind of problem. One day I was observing waves and noticing just how dissimilar they were one from another -- even though the underlying land form was fundamentally the same each time....I couldn't find a way in painting to deal with that kind of moment to moment change. I had to find a different way of addressing that phenomenon. So it has always been a problem solving thing for me and video solves that problem -- the problem of making an artwork that embraces change, evolution, and time which is as fundamental an aspect of landscape experiences as I can think of.
PS: Which brings me to something else you mentioned earlier: your experience of seeing an exhibition of Monet's series' paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago. And you mentioned earlier seeing the series almost as frames on a filmstrip.
BW: Yes. Monet in the 90's (curated by Paul Hayes Tucker) was an exhibition of Monet's series paintings (the Grainstacks, Rouen Cathedral, etc.) gathered together for the first time since they were made 100 years before. Finally we could see them together. It was a remarkable exhibition and a powerful experience for me. We've all seen the paintings but to see them as Monet had originally intended them to be seen was striking. Each painting seemed to participate on the wall like a frame in the films I had grown up with. The spaces between the Grain Stacks or the Rouen paintings seemed to be like missing frames. And thinking about the filmic quality of what Monet was trying to do , back in the 1890's, I was struck by it. Why did it take 13 years for me to act on that connection? Well, it wasn't clear to me that I should be trying to film landscape at that time and it wouldn't have been technically possible to do the (24 hour) versions. So I just mulled it over for all those years. But its true that a lot of my impulses have been feeding off of that show. I must have viewed the exhibition 20 times and I carry the memory of it with me wherever I go.
PS: In 2007 Pace Wildenstein gallery put up a show on cubism and early film. There are similar sorts of ideas about perception and time. You know, in a sense you were on to something that Monet was on to and that later artists picked up on.
BW: Yes. There was a film that I saw on the big screen in 1997 that, like the Monet show, made a huge impression on me -- the movie Mrs. Brown, directed by John Madden. The film is set in and around Balmoral in Scotland and is all about the relationship of Queen Victoria and her faithful manservant after the death of her beloved Albert. Its a great film and beautifully acted but what caught my attention was the way Madden seemed to allow the camera to linger on the land just as long as he could before the pressure of the narrative pushed him on. I thought, 'That's what I want to do. I want big paintings and I want to sustain that kind of experience. Film can't do that. It can't sustain that.' I made my first large pictures almost immediately after because I wanted to fill the viewer's field of vision like Madden had done in the theatre. That is more like landscape experience to me. I recognize that making a small painting feel monumental is a terrific trick to pull off. But I wanted big because that was like natural phenomena to me. its huge! So, it has always been a kind of filmic, big screen, big scale connection that kicked me forward, always driven by an effort to get it right, to get landscape phenomena right.
PS: So, if your art did everything you wanted it to do, if it brought you and the world everything you dared to dream of , what would that look like? What would that be?
BW: The first thing is that everybody would slow down. The pressure to do so much in such a short time is undermining our ability to be in the present. Why be in the present? Because that is the place where we think most clearly, where we are most creative, most thoughtful. We can notice the impact we are having on things, such as on the earth, but also on each other. It's a place of great creativity. My work is a meditation on landscape, yes, and on being in the moment but it is also an effort to get people to meditate on their own experience. We all need to think clearly about our experience and reflect on what we are all after because it is important right now for us to make very careful choices. And the only way to do that is to notice everything.