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Technicolor Vampire
Published in David Reed: You look good in blue, exhibition catalog, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2001.
Stephan Berg
Wes Craven’s 1984 horror film, “Nightmare on Elm Street” owes its success not only to the impressive character he gave to evil in the form of the razorblade gloved, burn–scarred, living–dead Freddy Krueger, but also to the simple though effective way with which he grants our nightmares real power over us. In this film evil can only strike when the young protagonists in their bedrooms sink into a restless slumber. Only then does the threat become fatal. Staying awake is the only possibility of escaping the horror. Here even necessary sleep produces monsters. Naturally this film, whose countless sequels, by the way, do not in the slightest live up to the original, is also always a discourse on the fragility of what we call reality. From the first, the relationship that Wes Craven investigates is visible on the poster for “Nightmare on Elm Street.” We see a peaceful middle-class American suburban street bathed in velvety nocturnal blue. The night sky, however, is being brutally slit open by four flashing, claw-like razors. This image, which illustrates both the American dream of an idyllic post-colonial harmony and its merciless destruction, presents its argument from the beginning via a media-designed definition of reality. For what is being slashed by the razor claws is not by any means reality, but the paper of the advertising poster that we see as a picture of the picture. The flat image is being destroyed by physical intervention that in turn stems from film material that is itself only a flat, bodiless zombie of an image. In this self–enclosed mediated horror show, reality is not admitted, or to put it differently: the real horror is not found in reality anymore but in the images that we shape of the horror.
There are several reasons why this text on the painter David Reed begins with comments on a modern classic horror film. One of them is based on Reed’s obvious interest in this theme, which is detectable in his obsessive preoccupation with Dracula and vampirism and culminated in a 1996 exhibition in Graz.1 A further reason is linked to the theme of sleeping, dreaming and the bedroom, which for Wes Craven’s film represents the essential topos and the dramaturgic basis for the development of the entire plot, while in Reed’s work and his theory it claims a similar, central place. That it is Reed’s ideal to be a painter of bedrooms has so often been recapitulated that it need not be gone into any further here. But it should be noted that Reed not only grants the bedroom a genuinely catalyst character, but explains: “All change begins in the bedroom.”2 The painter also characterizes the level of the dream as an adequate way to enter his picture world: “Paintings belong there where they … can be seen in personal moments of daydreaming.”3
The most important moment which establishes the connection between the film described above and Reed’s paintings, however, touches on the similar relationship that both grant to the status of reality. The basic constellation of “Nightmare on Elm Street” is that the world is a “closed circuit” of mediated layers; this becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of distinguishing between waking and dreaming and the permanent transgression between both areas. This poses an amazing parallel to the way in which David Reed creates his pictures. Reed experienced what was for him a central moment of truth in 1967 when he felt the need as an art student to leave his studio and go out to paint in the desert near Monument Valley. During one of these “plein air” painting excursions, he discovered a cave that on inspection he found so familiar that he was certain he had been there once before, possibly even in a previous lifetime. Twenty years later Reed saw John Ford’s western “The Searchers” and discovered the cave again, a cave which he had understood to be his very own individual recollection.4
In all Reed’s pictures, at least since the 80s, this experience of a pre–existing secondary reality is deeply embedded; even more, it is the essential theme of his art. The artist’s reflections on his work revolve around a pictorial concept in which — instead of the window on reality to which Alberti wanted to commit Renaissance painting — the idea is born that paintings are the shadows of realities that can never claim for themselves the status of solid, corporeal existence. It is not only the partly feverish and venomously luminous Technicolor hues and the horizontal wide–screen formats with which his painting underlines its relation to media technologies, it is the very facture of the paintings that holds them in an ambiguous state that hovers between impenetrably mirroring flatness and bodiless, extravagantly spray–foamed spatiality. All of this allows the intertwining, looping forms, with variously–defined similarities to celluloid film unreeling into a void, to become shadowy entities in an intangible cyberspace. In Reed’s art we meet a brilliant example of painting that, in these times of media saturation, always poses its basic question on the future of painting against the background of a wide–ranging art–historical inquiry, without allowing it to slip into anemic academicism. The shimmery surface contingence of these pictures is saturated with their reflection on the painterly contexts of Mannerism, the Baroque, American Abstract Expressionism and Minimal Art. These associations, too, have been broadly analyzed in texts on David Reed, not least of all in Dave Hickey’s excellent essay “David Reed’s Coming Attractions”.5 For our purposes what seems important is that Reed is in fact striving for a fundamental discourse on the objectives and possibilities of painting, in which the paradigms from the history of the medium that have been considered to be in opposition — such as narration and solipsism, the figurative and the abstract, illusion and flatness, a physically pulsating presence and distanced graphic articulation — are not meant to mutually exclude each other but to join together in a totality in which pictures are, as it were, the most real and the most unreal of what our world can show us.
Reed offers us a whole panorama: from the arrangement of the folds of theatrically illuminated Baroque robes that seem to be fluttering and flying towards us, to a gesture of expressive spontaneity, to the minimal–like repetition of willful brushstrokes that depict nothing but their own paint–applying movements. The fascinating part of it all is that the artist always maintains the balance. Never does his painting illustrate a thesis, never can it be reduced to a logical statement, emotional–physical or a conceptual–theoretical. The route that Reed chooses is aimed at establishing a level between such thesises, a level of seemingly contrary decisions. If (an attempt at formulation would argue) the reality of a painted image always includes its unreality, the site of the image can only be one that makes this oscillation between physical presence and withdrawal tangibly possible. Not least of all, therefore, Reed’s ambivalent position towards the museum is due to the fact that, according to him, it establishes the status of the paintings too one–dimensionally and thus makes them into distanced, didactic objects. As a counter–image he proposes the bedroom as a place where a painting is for him, without doubt, a part of our everyday experience and can become the object of an intimate dialogue while at the same time articulating the distancing methodology of the flat, the finite and the exhibited.
In fact the bedroom as a place for paintings, different from the museum, is packed full of paradoxical ambivalence. The idea of intimacy, which every bedroom carries with it, denies not only access to the paintings to be found there, but also, to a great degree, any view of them. While the museum institutionally subjects itself to the gesture of exhibition and therefore insists that the paintings not only can be, but must be seen, the bedroom shifts the presence of paintings to a secret twilight zone, which is only revealed to those who have access to this specific place. The painting’s partial invisibility could enhance its aura, but that is not what interests Reed, not at least primarily. More important in this strange mixture of availability and withdrawal is the atmosphere of reverse–reality that is promoted. The painting is all there, it is a part of our most intimate and simultaneously most everyday of practices, and yet it is a dazzlingly intangible phantom, a zombie of itself, that throws no shadow — a specter that painting makes possible through an act of paradoxical pictorial treatment. Characteristically, light and shade in Reed’s pictures arise from the paint being applied with brush and painting knife in such a way that light seems to shine where the picture ground has been laid open, while where the paint remains thick, there is the impression of shade.
Reed’s painterly facture is tellingly exact; it consists of an almost hyperreal, photographically live presence and greatly suggestive spatial insolence that is held captive and equally allowed to recede behind glossily polished, icily sealed surfaces. In the true meaning of the word, as Hanne Loreck and Peter Weibel both write, the relationship in these pictures between solid physical body and surface plane is uncanny.6 This is true because no relation between these two different readings of the surface can be taken for granted and no necessary link exists between them. The surface plane is not the skin of any body because no such thing exists. In a countermove the disembodied body is also not the foundation for the visible surface. Both shift within the methodology of their own chance contingency: they are momentarily what they are not. A glance at the physical way that Reed’s paintings are made impressively confirms this finding. The final surface of the painting that we see is the result of a long process that often lasts years, which has as its theme exactly this precarious relationship between volume and surface and thus indirectly also between the visible and the invisible. All Reed’s paintings are built up from a very carefully constructed, several millimeter–thick white acrylic ground on linen which is then then covered with a layer of alkyd paint, either in a monochrome color in a sequence of several bands of color. This colored ground is then sanded smooth. On this surface Reed puts down a layer of his color marks and then decides which parts of the picture will be erased. Sometimes only small segments, sometimes almost the whole surface is sanded off, several millimeters deep, back to the underlying white acrylic ground. As in a reverse archeological act, it is not what is hidden deep down that is laid open. That which has become visible is removed in order to make room for a newly built–up, and colored layer of alkyd paint on which a new form is painted. This surface layer may in turn possibly become the starting point for new interventions. Thus the partial deletion of the picture is in a certain sense the condition for its final existence. Beneath a supposed consistency, the painting conceals, in truth, a subtle inconsistency.
If we return to the introductory remarks on Reed’s interest in vampires and Peter Weibel’s exposition of vampirism in Reed’s painting7, the figure of the vampire can readily be understood as a metaphor for the way this painting looks. As a specter with no reflection of its own, the vampire would, in this way of thinking, be the perfect example of a surface that does not correspond to its own contents, thus linking visibility and invisibility in a paradoxical way.
Translated to the medium of painting, this would mean that the intact body, which painting once portrayed as its own, a blueprint of the world, this intact body has been under fire from the representational media and so atomized that it can only continue to exist as a phantom body. No effective power is gained by denying this development, but there is by making its erosion between surface and volume, picture and content, representation and the represented into the necessarily fragile basis of a pictorial practice and, in such a way, binding the living and the dead very tightly together.
One could add that the complex and elaborated allusions to the history of painting that haunt Reed’s painting can be seen parallel to interpretations that wish to see in the vampire a metaphorical paraphrase of the decline and fall of the feudal aristocracy, who were banished to the underground vaults of their ruined castles and palaces where they still could wield a certain power.
The intensity of Reed’s interest in the paradoxical figure of the living dead can also be seen in his prominent use of the 1958 Hitchcock classic „Vertigo” in two bedroom ensembles: „Judy’s Bedroom” (1992) and „Scottie’s Bedroom” (1994). „Vertigo” is based on the theme of necrophilia, the love for a woman that the hero obsessively clings to beyond her apparent death, because he thinks he has rediscovered her in a doppelgänger, who actually is the same woman, whose death he only believed he witnessed. The bedroom ensembles developed from this are so clever because they expand the central doppelgänger motif from the film into a staged reality. Reed thereby once again provokes an uncanny game between seemingly matching but incongruous volumes and surfaces. We see a bedroom setting that exactly duplicates the furnishings of a scene from the film „Vertigo” (being shown on a video screen within the ensemble). The scene has, however, been modified to include a painting by Reed that in the bedroom in the movie, as well as in the recreation of the set, replaces the original decoration of the wall. The real installed painting by Reed and its counterpart, copied into the film, seem to mutually authenticate each other, but also increase the ghostly effect of the painting’s actual presence. If David Reed’s painting visible in Hitchcock’s motion picture cannot actually be there, can the painting hung over the bed in the recreation of the set in turn be really there?
The bedroom proves to be problematic in a similar way. We see a film set that seems to have been carried over into reality. But in fact, Reed, who meticulously reconstructed the history of this film bedroom, did not use the beds from the movie for his installations, but had simple reconstructions made. We thus see objects, solid bodies, physically present and in the movie that, despite their identical surface appearance, have nothing to do with one another. The concept of reality which is created here recognizes only references that are self–enclosed. The more explicitly Reed’s paintings are staged in rooms in which their real everydayness can be certified, the more they deny, consciously as well as subtly, their matter–of–course, everyday presence.
When Reed stresses that his bedroom ensembles are meant to support the embedding of his paintings in the intimate and everyday context appropriate to them, their inviolability and their foreignness are also enhanced at least to the same degree. The bedroom in the exhibition room, particularly in its surrogate form as a film set, is subjected to a dislocation that does not actually bring intimacy and everydayness to the „white cube” but instead divests the bedroom of all its warmth and private–intimate emotion. What the bedroom ensemble shows us is a doubled image (the image of a bedroom that never became reality since it is in an exhibition space, and a second image which is based on a duplicate bedroom that was always only an image since it exists in a movie). In this doubled image the actual accessibility and livability of the image is only imaginable as fiction. The bedroom setting in which Reed shows his individual paintings is also, metaphorically speaking, the paradox of a living death, or put differently, the cold construction of an image, of an intimacy that has become an image and therefore cannot be experienced in reality.
The museum, however, in which these signs of an alienated intimacy (because only conceivable as an image) are staged, itself tends to become unexpectedly and paradoxically partly an intimate space. The more Reed’s interventions — from the beds to mirrored walls — obtrude on the spatial identity of the gallery, the more the gallery room refers back to its own logic. And this is exactly the essential achievement of this double constellation of painting and installation: the creation of a link between the painting and the site in which it is adequately visible now only because the site is partially undermined. These paintings and the doubled images of the bedroom ensembles strive just as little for a real life as they do for a purely artificial existence. They realize themselves in a subtle, oscillatory motion that couples their promise of reality, something internal and indwelling, to a structural withdrawal and to their pretensions to pure artificiality. On this self–encircling orbit, David Reed’s painting shines like cold fire. Its endless–seeming ornamental loops enwrap themselves, absorb the space they have created, keep themselves alive by sucking themselves dry. These loops are caught in a beautiful, lethal round dance of mirrored surfaces, in which they must not mirror themselves if they do not want to risk their existence. Reed’s painting is proof that all painting that is essential is reliant on an act of vampirism – vampirism towards reality, or as in Reed’s case, towards what we are accustomed to calling its image, that is, towards itself.
Notes
1. Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, 20 Jun — 28 Jul 1996. Cf. above all the detailed and enlightening text by Peter Weibel: “Phantom Malerei. Reed lesen: Zwischen Autopsie und Autoskopie” in the exh. cat. Günther Holler–Schuster/Peter Weibel (eds.), Neue Malereien für den Spiegelsaal und Studien von David Reed, Graz (1996) pp 41-48.
2. Quoted from: David Reed, Martin Hentschel/Udo Kittelmann (eds.), exh. cat. of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Westfälischer Kunstverein (1995) p 13.
3. Ibid., p 15.
4. Quoted from: David Reed: Paintings/Motion Pictures, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1998) p 12f.
5. Ibid., pp 22-35.
6. Cf. fn. (1), above all p. 57ff.
7. Cf. fn. (1), above all p 47f.