Painting and Truth: A Conversation. Jan Valentin Sæther and Lars Fr. H. Svendsen

LARS: Our point of departure in this conversation might as well be the obvious question: Why on earth does a sensible person like yourself paint? I remember this interview Warhol gave in the mid-80's, in which he says that he thinks that it's nice that people paint, and he guesses that people must have some reason for doing it. What really amazes him is the strange fact that painting continues. I basically agree with Warhol: I appreciate the fact that you paint, but I have difficulties with understanding why.

JAN: I appreciate that you ask the question, but I will probably come up short with an answer. It comes down to a choice I made a long time ago. An idea came over me and took charge. One could call it a painters imperative. Of course, I had painted for quite some time, but it suddenly announced itself as an imperative: I had to paint! It felt like it was also related to my family background, which was in the bourgeoisie. Living a human life seemed to be incompatible with that environment. What painting seemed to offer me, was the opportunity to actually live. It wasn't merely a romantic dream of realizing my creativity, but rather an existential necessity. The very activity of painting stood out as the only possible course of action.

LARS: I can see that. But the reasons you give are to circumstances outside of the painting. Aren't there any reasons related to the painting itself? Why paint? After all, one can make a break with one's background in countless other ways, for instance by doing something as silly as I did, starting doing philosophy. I'm asking you a question that I would be unable to answer myself. I know why I started doing philosophy, but I really don't know why I kept on doing it, especially after losing most of my faith in the fruitfulness of the activity. I guess that my main reason for continuing is that I still haven't found any alternative to it. But this conversation is not about me, so I just repeat my original question: Why painting? Why not some other activity?

JAN: I can second that. In 1969 I quit painting for a little over a year, after realizing that painting was not any longer a viable force for change, that it did not any longer have the power to progress beyond its own circle of colleagues, theories and connoisseurs. Well, I wrote for a while instead, until I discovered that all I wrote about was painting, art and society. Very confused stuff, I might add, but never the less why write about painting, I thought, as if to defend it against a demise I had accepted. So I started painting again, not because it gave me back the faith or some such thing, but because the act of painting remained a viable way to differentiating reality, in spite of its waning role in history. For a long time after that painting was a good medium for me, but in the last ten years or so, I have felt that chapter coming to a close. I have looked hard and deep into the remnants of the past during that time, deep enough any way, such as it appears in our records at least, to see that clocks don't go backwards. The arrow of time cannot be reversed and meaning remains meaningful only when new experience is allowed to dissolve the old forms of meaning before they are hijacked into the service of tepid surrogates for their freshness, recipes for a beauty without fire. It was an expensive lesson, but with surprising bonuses. I saw the end of my interest in historical painting in the early nineties, but no new visions came. While waiting it was as if I was completing paintings for a good friend who had passed away. I was done with that in January—and then came a vision. Now there has emerged a need to expand into other media, putting things together differently. The different media of text and image are no longer separate expressions I think, the separate functions and social locations of texts and images in pre industrial times were largely the function of specialized skills, It seems feudal barriers between the classes designated text and image, to operate in separate social strata. Modernity is very much a linguistic superseding of the old order of image separate from text. Perhaps we see an ongoing change in the application of language towards a simultaneity of number, sign, image and text, speech and music. It looks to me as if this very situation of being more densely surrounded by multiple languages might also be a cause of insights into the impermanence of the signified, the instability of meaning and fragility of interpreting content. Dependent on time and place (e.g. the cronotope of Bakhtin). Anyway, I find this interesting. At the same time I am not at all sure that humans can handle it. Not so much that the language complex in the brain cannot handle it, given all the ways languages varies and alphabets invent mute signs for sound, the brain centers for language seems to thrive on multiple mastery. There might be a problem however with overcrowding the inter-human semiotic space. Anyway a painting, an image, is perceived in a continuous gaze, whereas writing has a linear timeline to unfold in. But the visuality of texts changes things around in Interesting ways. To use these various forms of expression I'm looking towards mixing these strains into some sort of synthesis.

LARS: A synthesis? Being an old Kantian, I would rather see the "sensuality" of painting and the discursivity of writing as somewhat anti-thetic to each other.

JAN: Maybe "synthesis" isn't the right word. But since I wrote "The Viloshin letters" in '92 I have been waiting for the visions that could bring together the visual and the verbal. Maybe it is just a way of dealing with what has been two conflicting tracks within me. I could perhaps say that I'm trying to move an old conflict between painting and writing within me, in to meet somehow, and I will investigate this in my next projects.

LARS: I see your point, and I think it's a good idea. A lot of your earlier painting were characterized by a rather weighty symbolism. Don't take this the wrong way—as you are well aware, I like your paintings—but the symbolism of your earlier works was often a little bit too weighty for me. I got the impression that you wanted to take control over my responses to the painting. Again: As an old Kantian, I appreciate the "free play of the imagination" as a central aspect of aesthetic experience. Especially given the central role of gnosticism in your spiritual life, you seemed to leave too little room for interpretation.

JAN: I don't wish to have strict control over your associations, but I wanted the figurative work to become architectonic in composition and a vernacular narrative; to meet the viewer in an imaginal circumscribed realm where the narrative structure would touch mythical currents while leaving the narrative elements to be open to further play of the imagination. After all, to paint is an attempt to communicate. I think I have succeeded a few times, but for the most part I see this project as concluded. I'm not indifferent to the viewer's freedom. But like with touch, creative encounters can limit freedom to a dialogic course of events. As Duke Ellington said; "Limits is a good thing for creativity." As to the role of a gnostic world view; I realized in '92 the impossibility of a normative iconography for gnosticism given its historical demise at the hands of the inquisition of Constantine the great, long before such developments could take place within a continuous tradition. Since then gnostic expressions have been the domain of individual creativity. You can't have one iconography develop out of a heterodox hermeneutic environment. I think your argument is well put, for in the sporadic examples of individual endeavors to express gnostic visions and attitudes there is variety and generous room for interpretations. My intellectual and spiritual debt to the traditions of gnosticism, alchemy, Sufism and Cabala—has caused these hermeneutics to invade a lot of my earlier working praxis. I shall not go into what particular experiences I have had that resonated with these various gnosis traditions, but they were of an expanded reality which is immediately accepted and confirmed on account of the generosity. In large cosmologies of that nature, inflation of ideas is a perilous cragmire which is only redeemed by embracing the immanent—maybe? I have no big answers, but there are some big questions. Reality is very strange. All this mystical business becomes dubious as text of course, although the experience remains irrepressible. Symbols emerge as alternate expression like signposts in a no-man's land between experience and language, sort of a visual product of cultural abstraction. I believe symbols work like color, they are analog as quality of experience, and withdrawn from objective scrutiny. But symbols are fickle in our flux of modernity and urban 3-D board games shifting with the throw of the dice. Symbols are rooted in nature and barely available on vacation. Nature seems like a dubious term applied to practically any geographical location nowadays. Culture on the other hand spews out brands and trends, quasi-symbols, that are rapidly cannibalized and rendered useless except to confirm flux. In an urban environment of this kind symbols are too easily turned into tricks, and symbols of nature used as political means to heal social ills, is suspiciously fascistic. And symbols, as in conservative preservation of meaning and values smell to much of the graveyard. Anyway, I believe that I have left my old "symbolic phase" behind me now.

LARS: You have? I've gotten your Exile-series, which you are working on, all wrong, then. I interpreted the various concrete exiles as a symbol of the human condition as such, that being human means being in a permanent state of exile.

JAN: Your interpretation is gnostical. The Exile-series is a work of transition, Combining, using, some of the earlier works in a new context, because in part they contain the seeds to my transition into a much more contemporary orientation. The exile series will simply document this transition. My original intentions with the series no doubt grew out of my gnostic reading of existence, But now I see it more as an investigation into states of exile which do not necessarily exhibit such meta-dimensions. Think of a political exile, it may not have the dimensions of a transcendental cosmic drama, but rather as a hammering experience of otherness, strangeness and constriction. The very difference of minds seems to reveal the mind as the closest thing to absolute immanence perhaps. Maintaining a strong conviction almost inevitably leads a person into some form of exile. But, of course, even as we are speaking in concrete terms here, we are simultaneously touching the core of the gnostic world view, in which a radical encounter with the consensus perception of reality is central.

LARS: I guess that our perceptions of reality are at odds with each other on this point. I rather see the common, dull acceptance of virtually everything as the main problem, at least in the Western world. The process of leveling, which has gone on for centuries, has made it virtually impossible to establish something like an oppositional stance, a position contrary to everything else.

JAN: Well, yes and a contrary position is a contrary question. My interest in figurative painting set me early on in a contrary position. . . However, the problem with the new classical painting was it's popular association with "real art". Too many people in society embrace this view and a resurgence of classical painting would certainly not be a renaissance, far from it. So being contrary in the art camp only to be accepted as fitting the bill as supplier of this real art, proved to be counterproductive to my original interests in figurative painting. one is not recognized in one's otherness. Recognition based on art production that fits this label for real art cannot ever be a recognition of one's otherness.

LARS: Perhaps that is the main theme in your art, at least I have thought so, that, after everything, all humans are in a position were they do not fit into the world, even though they may not recognize this themselves. On the one hand, what you set out to express is something very personal, a feeling of not being at home in the world, of not belonging, but on the other hand, this very feeling is in a strong sense supposed to be about all humans. Being human means not being at home in the world, it is about loneliness, about being in exile. However, in this very feeling of not belonging, there's a place where humans can truly meet and identify with each other.

JAN: It is both personal and impersonal at the same time. On a biographical level, it all comes back to this one crucial experience I made several years ago, which I described as an expansion of reality not usually available to perception. This is the experience that presented me with the painterly imperative we talked about earlier. Mystical experiences have an accompanying aesthetic arrest of semblance to wholeness—an image or a mood which lacks nothing. Everything else emerge as lacking in context and is incomplete in itself.

LARS: In a famous fragment, Novalis writes that we always seek the Unbedingte, the unconditioned, but always merely find Dinge, mere objects. Is that your ambition: To represent the unconditioned, and not merely produce yet another object? After all, paintings are merely objects, to put it bluntly.

JAN: Yes, paintings are objects, but they can acquire and represent various qualities. But, in order to have such qualities they must be free of utility. All works of art are useless, but not all useless objects are works of art. Duchamp's pissoire has lost its utility. That's the trick. The relation between the objecthood and the meaning of a work of art is analogous to the relation between the human body and the human soul.

LARS: The difficulty lies in figuring out precisely what this relation is. Is the relation ideally characterized by harmony or conflict? According to Hegel, the relation is ideally one of harmony. He divides art into three categories: the symbolic, the classical and the romantic. In the symbolic art, there is more form than content, more objecthood than meaning, we might say, and therefore the meaning of the work of art is not fully expressed—he sees Egyptian art as the main example of this. In classical art, which was mainly realized in ancient Greece, there is complete harmony between spirit and matter. Such a work of art does not symbolize anything else, but expresses itself. In romantic art, there is more spirit than matter, because the objects are no longer capable of expressing the spirit. Let's leave Hegel there. My main point was simply to mention his model, which contains harmony as an ideal. Heidegger, on the other hand, argues that the work of art is characterized by a strife between these two elements, which he calls earth and world. The earth-aspect refers to the objecthood of the work and the world-aspect to the meaning. These two elements pull in opposite directions, and in between them, there is a Riss, a fracture or fissure. I guess most people would place you in the Hegelian camp, but I see you as more of a "closet-Heideggerian" in this respect.

JAN: Even though I can be inclined to agree with both Hegel and Heidegger, I too, guess I feel a closer affinity to the Heideggerian position on this point. The Riss could also be seen as a scar I suppose, and maybe painting as an embodiment and recovering of that scar is what my artistic practice has been all about, until now.

LARS: Would you agree with me that a problem with much contemporary art is that this Riss is missing? Especially so-called postmodern art, with its endless references to previous works of art, has very little earth in them, and mainly contain world. The works of art become an endless play of significations, signs which bump into each other, but who lack friction against the earth, the material.

JAN: Is that why the effect of shock has been so essential to much recent art?

LARS: I believe so. The shock works as a surrogate for the earth, for materiality.

JAN: This is of consequence for my situation. The semiotic space is getting crammed. How do I avoid simply producing more signs?

LARS: Here we return to the initial question, "Why paint?", yet another time. Is not this why painting makes sense after all? A painting does contain a specific sort of materiality, something which provides friction for the sign, thereby making it possible for them actually to mean something.

JAN: I agree. Painting is more than illustration in this way. There is substance to painting. Painting is a like marriage, it contains both unity and strife.

LARS: I'm reminded of this passage in Kant's lectures on logic, where he describes the imagination and the understanding as "two friends who are constantly quarreling, but who cannot live without each other." The imagination would here be the sensuous, the material, whereas the understanding is discursivity. Could this be an illustration of painting?

JAN: Yes, at least for me each new painting is an attempt to bring this quarrel yet another step further, to educate the quarrel. It is impossible to avoid a reflection parallel to the working process. All works of art are essays, attempts. Attempts at getting to the truth. And all paintings are failures, even though some fail more miserably than others. The goal always lies beyond what one is capable of achieving. The history of art shows with consistency that art rarely fulfills the lofty goals it has for itself. Works of art can be seen in the light of the Christian mystery of crucifixion, that when the word comes into this world, it dies on the cross. The cost of having truth in form is the purchase of a deadly disease.

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