sideSTOPS IN INTERESTING PLACES. . . .

Welcome to the extension site, currently featuring the full text of my conversation with Philadelphia artist Mauro Zamora. 

To access or return to the primary STOPS IN INTERESTING PLACES blog and segmented installments of the interview click here. 

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Interview with Mauro Zamora

SC: Do you feel you work more from external or internal motivation?

MZ:
Both. Externally first, because that sets up the motivations behind why
I would want to cover a specific subject. But internal in a big way, in
the sense that so much of the progression of the work visually does
stem from one step to the next step to the next, and it’s very
purposeful for me in the way that I pursue that. Still, mostly
external, because you live in the world and you should be part of it [Laughs], and can’t live in a vacuum… 

 
SC: Well there’s still that Romantic Artist, ‘I’m a vessel’, kind of thing -

MZ: Artist alone in a garret, slaving away…

 

SC: Right, and with that there’s the whole, ‘I don’t know where it
comes from…’ idea, and for some people that’s not bullshit.

MZ:
I was talking with a friend today whose a writer, and we were saying it
really is a lot about habit. This whole idea that inspiration strikes,
and at two a.m. you wake up and vomit out this amazing novel that
changes the course of history is total bullshit. Inspiration hits you
once, and then you have weeks and months of struggle and fight dealing
with that initial inspiration, and the habit of sitting down every day
and writing three pages, or two pages, or what have you. It’s the same
as going to the studio everyday, and if all you have is one hour to
work that’s what you have to do every day to make sure that fit of
inspiration carries through. And if people say they don’t know where it
comes from, then it’s because they’re not thinking about it. 

SC: How important is it to you that what you put into it people get out of it? I know the general line is, ‘I put my work out there and people will see what they see’, but is that a line for you—is that true? [Both laugh]

MZ: That one’s really hard because you never know if anybody ever
"gets" your work. You always want people to know what you’re talking
about. In thinking about the art that I like, I also like work that I
don’t necessarily know what it’s about, and so there’s a bit of a
chase. I’ve always been drawn to work that’s more mysterious than let’s
say illustrative, or more mysterious then cut-and-dry.

 

SC:
I think I am too. Like I’ve said many times that’s a big part of what
attracts me to your work. But for me the dissecting part often comes
aside from the experience part. When I take my students to view art, I
always ask them to look before they read—see what happens.

MZ: Feel the work.

SC:
Yeah. Insight into background and intention can add, but it’s important
to know you don’t have to “get it” in order to experience it, to have a
response to it. And I also think the inscrutable aspects of it are
sometimes the most important—I think the need to explain your work can be detrimental.

MZ:
And people have opinions, and sometimes what you think the image is
saying a lot of people aren’t necessarily going to get. Sometimes I
think it’s better if art is a bit mysterious, and I’d rather hook
people on my work over time with a building body of work than be an
artist with a bunch of one-liners.

SC:
I think that’s extremely pertinent to your work because it is very
self-reflexive. A lot of your work is built on what your work is -

MZ: Exactly. 

SC: And branching out from it, going against it or pushing this and
that out of it. That’s not to say people can’t appreciate pieces on an
individual basis, but knowing your work definitely makes it more
interesting.

…Talk to me about some external sources you draw from and how they effect and feed into your work..

MZ:
The most interesting thing to me, and I think many people when they
find this out, is that the influences in my work aren’t from Painting
or painters. What I look at, or what I’m influenced by as far as the
work that I like, has to do with the fact that I have an extreme
skepticism for Painting in general. I don’t know how else to explain it
except I don’t wholeheartedly, totally believe that I’m just going to
make paintings, or that you can just make paintings, or that paintings
only exist within that realm. We’re not in a time-frame historically
where we’re dealing with movements and all that crap, anything goes. So
the idea that I’m just going to look at painters seems ridiculous to
me. And, I may be making paintings or installations, and a lot of my
work has to do with Painting, but I also feel looking at what I do
isn’t necessarily the best thing for me to be doing. Maybe it’s more
exciting for an influence to come from something that has nothing to do
with the type of work you make; and that’s just for me, I’m not making
a broad judgment. And I can’t say I don’t love painters or that they
don’t influence me, but in terms of artists that I really love to look
at almost all the time- or anytime that they have an exhibition or when
I see an image by them- they typically are not painters. * [ Of the
specific names Mauro forwarded me, per my request, most of the
influences listed place as Installation artists.]          

SC: In your Response* you noted being a "reluctant painter"…
in a later conversation we brought this around to the issue of
classification. Where or how does that fit in respect to the dynamic
and dialogue in your work between these different mediums?

MZ: I think I’m a reluctant painter because my first interest is the
concept and what the image means, and the symbol behind what’s being
described as opposed to the "how" of Painting. In that respect I’m not
as interested in paint as possibly many painters are. And it’s not that
I don’t think about the material or how I use it, I do, but it isn’t a
major interest or obsession. So then my interest becomes why am I going
to use this image and what does a representation of this thing mean;
how am I going to use it or not use it. 

Then,
reluctance completely because when I started to make installations they
were envisioned with the idea that they would never be permanent, never
exist longer than the time they were meant to be exhibited, and they
shouldn’t be saved. I don’t want them to have any sentiment; they live
and they die. There’s a strong image I remember. When I lived in Texas
I saw a show by Mark Tansey who did all these illustrative paintings
that dealt with the History of Art. And there was this one painting ["Triumph Over Mastery"] of a person in the Sistine Chapel on a
scaffold with a roller of white paint—painting over the Michelangelo
fresco. I wouldn’t say that was the impetus for why I began making
installations, but it made me think. And then when I started to make
this work I thought, "That’s a really interesting way to force myself
to make paintings that aren’t truly paintings." They’re images painted
on a wall but they don’t get to live as paintings—they’re not immortal,
they’re meant to die. That’s also a very interesting way to approach
art-making because so much of the classical training I got was about
being able to produce an object, and being able to produce an object
that would stand the test of time. I think it’s interesting to be able
to make work that stands the test of time because time remembers it,
not because it lives on.

hhhhhhhh

SC:
I think we rephrased it well in our prior session when you said, ‘I’m
not really interested in being a painter’ and I came back, ‘I think
you’re interested in not being a painter.’ Both laugh It’s interesting
because you’re utilizing your skepticism instead of discarding the
whole idea of it [Mauro nods] -you’re
trying to play into that. I like that your influences are coming from a
place, and kind pushing it with another medium which plays so strongly
with that, and all the constructs and conventions involved.

…One
of the things that struck me in terms of the artists you listed, was
their connection to something you’d mentioned recently about scale, in
that a lot of the work I’ve seen of the artists you like contains that
element—this grand, confrontational, enveloping scale. I was wondering
how or if the scale you work in, or maybe even envision working in,
relates to your influences in that respect?

MZ:
Scale is an interesting issue for me because I’m trying to do something
with Installation that obviously relates to Painting, because my
installations, so far, have been all about Painting. So scale plays an
interesting role for me just in respect to the image. As far as
influences, I don’t think there’s much relation. The artists I’m
interested in influence me because of the look of the work, the mood of
the work, the way that they organize things visually, or, for some of
the artists, how they theoretically organize things. It’s not to say
the things I make won’t get larger in scale, and I do envision things
that would be larger because they would have to be larger

SC:
A couple other things these influences raised for me were that there’s
a conceptual level, a “Conceptual Art” level or component to some of
their work. And then the event aspect—which is related—I see that
connection through a lot of them as well.

MZ:
Well, event… One thing I’ve been toying with, and this relates to
scale—I feel there’s a place or a point in dealing with scale where
when something gets big enough it ceases to be the thing it was
originally intentioned to be. You take a painting for example, and blow
it up to a ridiculous size—at some point that thing may cease to be a
painting, it will become something else. I saw a show recently
featuring these enormous paintings that had to have been at or maybe
larger than billboard size. I started to think a painting that huge on
stretched canvas almost doesn’t feel like a painting, you don’t enjoy
it as you enjoy a painting. In the sense that when you look at a
painting you can take most of it in, and sometimes these felt so big
that that wasn’t possible, so then the experience is different. And
that to me has a lot to do with time.

SC: Right

MZ:
So that concept is probably a clue into the installations. The idea
that taking an image and making it really big and then having it be on
the wall changes how you interact with the image, or how you deal with
the image—it becomes an event. That’s the only way I can describe it, because, in a sense, it requires time to be able to read the entire image—you
cant necessarily perceive it all at once. The other aspect of event for
me has to do with the fact that the installations are made one time—and
then they’re gone—and the only thing that’s left is documentation that
they took place. So then the only way anyone can experience it is
either by finding a picture of it or by remembering it; that to me is
tied very strongly to a sense of event.  

SC:
The ephemeral quality of the installations…do you see an intentional
contradiction between putting it on a wall in terms of the permanence
of the construction of the wall, of the space itself?         

MZ:
That’s interesting to me and I guess I’ve thought of that. But really
the most exciting thing is to be able to say here’s this architectural
space and I have to interact with it, and think about it, and then think about myself,
my work, my process in relation to it—which you don’t always do when
you’re just hanging a show; dealing with that situation was very
appealing to me. I also feel very few people really interact with the
architecture that’s around them, when that’s really the intention
of the architecture. Maybe in your home because you live there day
after day, but very rarely otherwise; and very few people think about
it. So hopefully in making an image that’s built on the wall and then
disappears that memory aspect of, " remember when this thing was once here, and now it’s gone,"
is going to force them to interact with or think about that space, deal
with the fact that this wall is curved or there’s a corner here.
Architects, I hope, are always thinking about what they design in
relation to the humans that interact with it, or the Nature that’s
going to be around it, or the place in which they’re actually building
it. I think about that a lot as well, so my work does deal with that in
a big way.

SC: In the Response you also alluded to Installation as placing you "in the realm of a performer."

MZ:
The performative element comes into play when I’m making the
installations because the bottom line is I have to perform. I’ve got a
few days to make this thing happen and that’s it, finished or not the
show must go on. Also, the way I’ve been working all I have is the
planning until the day I go in. So the idea that there’s a limited
window for this piece to be executed and within that window of time it
needs to be done, for me it heightens this performance situation that
in Painting is never heightened. We as viewers only experience a
painting after months and months or years of the artist working on it,
but we don’t necessarily experience the performance aspect of a
painting being made. That’s not to say that people are necessarily
experiencing the performance aspect of my installations being made, but
I think almost anyone would be able to logically put together that a
month ago this wasn’t here

SC:
Theres an immediacy to it.

MZ:
Right. Obviously this thing got made in a matter of days , so that
allows for a bit of the performance situation to come into the work..          

SC:
And maybe adds to the whole transient aspect of it, that its creation
is situated in a specific time, the temporality in that sense is
heightened as well.    

MZ: Yeah.         

SC:
I’m curious whether, in relation to what you were saying earlier,
there’s a connection for you in terms of the objectness of Painting—or not making an object—and the dimensional aspects of your installations, in regards to your choice in making the pieces primarily 2-D, though there have been 3-D elements? 

MZ:
The option of making an Installation was exciting because it allowed
for me to break with everything that had to do with Painting in a
sense: there’s the performance aspect, the fact that its bigger than my
largest paintings tend to be, the ephemeral issue, the element of time,
the event—and on top of all that I’m not making an object. I just
started to think to myself that I have all these ideas and things I’m
interested in which really have very littleto do with  Paint-ting,
in general, or where Painting comes from. And I’ve always had this
reluctance about being pigeon-holed or titled. Growing up when I
decided I was going to be an artist I thought I want to be a great
artist, I never said I want to be a great painter. So I thought
Installation was a way to break all of this, and to force myself not to deal with issues of Painting…which, ironically, has made me deal precisely with issues of Painting [Laughs.]

SC: One of the reasons I asked specifically was that
although Installations go beyond the object—because they become about
the interaction with the viewer, and the interaction with the space,
and the interaction with the viewer within the space—a lot of
Installation work involves making objects to a certain extent. Maybe
you wouldn’t want to call them objects because they have a different
intention, but…

MZ:
Yeah. And some of the installations—and I haven’t made that many
yet—have been just purely painting, but what’s been interesting to me
are some of the choices I’ve made: one installation had sound, one had
a digital animation that was projected over top, and the other one had
very ephemeral kind of sketchbook drawings attached and trash as part
of it. I feel like there are points where even within making
installations on [one dimensional ] planes that holds all these ideas
together. So in my choices for making certain things, I’m always
thinking about all those aspects. In that sense I don’t know that it is
purely a painted image on the wall, because I’m actually always
considering what else it could be.

SC: Or what more could it be –

MZ: Right

SC: Because the possibility is there.

 

MZ: And it’s so much more interesting for me
to push all those limits and to force myself to make an animation or
put together a sound collage…that’s very challenging. Those are, I
guess, my efforts of saying I’d rather be an artist than just a painter.

SC: Let’s get a bit into the silhouette, which was the topic of the first sentence of my Diatribe. I’m interested in the quote ‘long story’ of how you came to it, and the last points in your Response which related it to memory. 

MZ:
I came to use the silhouette because I wanted to play with images that
straddled the line so to speak. And initially the idea of using the
silhouette was a way of dealing with that because a silhouette is both
specific and generic at the same time, or, you could say, local and
global. Overall it’s a symbol if
you make a silhouette of a trash bag it’s a symbol of a trash bag. At
the same time it’s very specific, because it can’t be taken as much
else other than a trash bag; but it has no modeling, it’s just a simple
thing. That became a very interesting way for me to think about dealing
with images and what the images mean, and how to juxtapose those
images. It was also an interesting way to deal with visual space,
because if everything’s flattened out there’s not a lot of depth, and
you have to create visual space through line and angle and suggestion
as opposed to modeling and light and air. So it made Painting more
interesting for me, and it made dealing with representational things or
objects more interesting for me.

…Silhouette was tied to memory for me when I first began to use it because I felt
that’s how memories worked to begin with. Memory is unreliable, so in
recalling things from the past they could be this way or they could be
that way, they’re generic and specific.

 
SC: Absolutely.

 
MZ: And I don’t know that any of the paintings really dealt with the issue
of memory but I liked this idea that they straddled this line, that it
could be either / or, yea or nay. And that’s been a big influence
throughout all my work, this idea of the fine line between one
thing or another, where it could go either way, or almost be both
things at the same time depending on how you look at it and who you
are. And I guess a big influence in even thinking of using the silhouette was [Jorge Luis] Borges, not that he ever talked about it, but his work has such a sense of memory to it and such a sense of mystery to it that I always loved. And when I started thinking about how in nature a silhouette is formed, or when
a silhouette is formed, it has to do with the end of the day or the
very beginning of the day. At dawn or during the gloaming is when you
get a silhouette, anytime the light falls behind something. I always
felt those times of day to be very mysterious, and, at least
within Western literature, that’s the time when evil things happen.
Looking back through the Romantic era, Frankenstein or Dracula
especially… the vampire kills at night until the dawn, and, as the
story’s told, they wait until almost the very last moment to get their
last feed. It’s an eerie part of the day. So the way the Silhouette
sits on a line, being generic and specific, the time of day that gives us
the silhouette naturally also is on a line—it’s the edge of the day…
or… the edge of the night. And that time, the gloaming, has a very
distinct mood, which I purposely wanted in my work. It was something
that I wanted to capture. So using the silhouette seemed like a way for me to be able to do that.

SC: Those are my favorite times of day too. And I think there’s always a measure of unreality about it. [Mauro nods] And
there are numerous factors involved in that: it’s partly because people
usually aren’t around, there’s a stillness…and the consistency of the
light—everything’s kind of evened out. There’s a sort of, for lack of a
better word, cinematic quality to it.

 
MZ: Mm-hmm.

SC: It’s so detached from your everyday life, there’s something really beautiful about that.

MZ: I also feel like it’s the time of day where one most experiences time.

SC: Yes.

MZ: As we’re going through the day the light is somewhat generic—give or take the weather— and the day can pass by and you don’t necessarily experience the time. But at dawn and dusk, during the gloaming, you do,
because very quickly you see the change, you actually feel it. Those
moments when we actually have the ability to experience the
fleetingness of that, it’s a very unique ‘human experience, because
we’re aware of it. So, I also thought, "Painting has a lot of things, but it never has time."

 
SC: Except when people specifically try to assert that, Cubism and whatnot… or, at least those movements tried to experiment with that.

 
MZ: Right, but those things don’t read
that way, at least not for me. That was always the qualm I had when
people talked about Cubism, oh we’re dealing with drawing this image in
the round in 2-D… I just thought it doesn’t read that way, it reads
like something else.

SC: The theory’s there but is that how you experience it.

 
MZ: Exactly. And it’s not that anyone’s going to look at my paintings and experience time either, but I like that possibility.

hhhhhhhh

SC:
Something we both wrote on, which I’d suggest relates extensively to
what we’ve just discussed, is the concept of the uncanny—this kind of
heightened awareness of the unreality, or meta-reality, or
under-reality…being attached to something that is general and yet
specific, and tied to the idea of the familiar and strange. For me that
feeling is definitely realized in your work. And it does have to do with time, and memory is an element within it—because how you felt it worked is
actually how it works, how our minds work, our mental schema: general
concepts and specific experiences. Is part of the mood you want to
capture something you connect specifically to the uncanny?

 
MZ:
In reading Freud’s uncanny, it definitely has to do with time, memory,
remembrance…you witness a scene and that scene is familiar but
unfamiliar—it’s unheimlich, we all know that feeling. And to me
it ties directly to mood, you only get that feeling because there’s a
mood. So yeah, the uncanny is important to me and to the work because
that essay is a way of continually going back and thinking about mood
and how to create that kind of mood. And part of what’s great about that mood is that it’s mysterious—you
know why, but you don’t know why. It’s again that idea of the gloaming
being on the edge of the day or the edge of time, because you don’t
know what’s next. And there are many things out there that have that
mood applied to it, it can be like varnish

 
SC: What do you mean by that, what does varnish mean in that way?

 
MZ:
This goes to classical training I guess, but some artists apply varnish
to their paintings when they’re done, and it has to do with technical
issues but it also has to do with a look.

SC: It creates depth in a way, a richness.

 
MZ:
It adds to it or changes it. I’ve always thought the media does that,
the media paints what it wants with its brush of colors, but its colors
happen to be a slant towards this side of the politics or a slant
towards that. So there’s no reason why a person whose dealing with
images can’t do the same thing, instead of picking up your varnish
you’re picking up your mood, you apply it, add it to the scenario
you’re thinking about or creating. In a way Freud’s essay kind of
breaks it down, and other artists’ writings I’ve read discussing the
uncanny note this as well. I’m not saying it’s this mechanical sort of
thing, you only know you get to that mood when you get to it. For me, the best
work is always work that forces you to be outside yourself, because
when you’re forced to be outside yourself or outside the situation that
you’re comfortable in then you’ve got to think about where you’re at
and why you’re there.

 
SC:
Which to me presents displacement as a key aspect and experience, being
outside yourself and your surroundings but at the same time not
entirely disconnected from either. I see this as tying to your work and
imagery as a whole—that you’re not doing something completely distanced
from reality because that’s not as disconcerting or enticing a place to
be as on the edge of that, or finding that fine line. But if mood is
like varnish it’s also more difficult, because it’s not something where
you can just pick up one thing and say here’s how I achieve
this. It’s trickier, maybe you don’t know exactly how you get it. So
does what you said about finding the mood refer at all to having to
step back and see how it comes into the work?

 
MZ:  No, not necessarily,  more like does the image allow you to feel that sense of being displaced. I know when I’ve hit that point or reached that mood when I can say to myself ‘Oh, that’s weird."  And I think you can know how you might obtain a mood because it’s around us all over the place.

SC: But representation is much different than reality.

 
MZ: Of course, but these aren’t necessarily things that we feel in reality. It
has to do more with the unconscious in a way, and it obviously relates
more to a dream-state then our reality. For example, in this town we
have three or four foggy nights a year, so those are the few times of
the year you get that feeling because of that effect.

 
SC: Still, capturing that feeling isn’t easy.

 
MZ:
True, but you don’t have to paint fog to capture that feeling, there
are so many other things. And what’s weird to you isn’t what’s weird to
me, it’s kind of a give and take. All I can do if I’m trying to create
that mood is see whether it’s coming across for me personally.

SC: Well what’s interesting about that, and I think it’s a strength of your work, is that you’re not going for the obvious in that. You’re not using obvious imagery to create it.

 
MZ: Well… I mean [Smiling] that’s been done before, right?

SC: So has everything, it doesn’t stop people from doing it.

 
MZ:
Well, [Smiling] okay. But, you know, I grew up in more or less the
Southwest and
everything’s bright and the sky is always blue, so my relation and
interaction with colors wasn’t from the secondary/tertiary side of the
palette, it was always prismatic so to speak. So that became a
challenge—how do I make kooky, eerie things using fun, sweet little
colors? [Laughs] That was part of it, I identify with those colors to
begin with and I
didn’t want to make Pop Art. Even though it’s a little pop-y,
maybe. [Laughs]

SC: But that’s one of the contradictions, right? There’s face value and then there’s something you think it is, but it’s not that, then it sort of is that, then it isn’t, then it is…I think that’s what keeps you in the image. And you say "that’s been done before"
but not every artist goes in there to challenge themselves, some
artists say what’s my most direct route to getting this. So I’d say
that’s an important distinction.

sss

SC:
There are definite signatures as far as frameworks or premises that
thread through your images—visually, contextually, both facets of
practice.. and there are skews. So I’ll
leave it open but couch it somewhat deliberately and ask for some
perspective on the content and its connection to the situations you’re
trying to submit, if not portray.

 
MZ: The content of my work…I can say that my work is about
things that are on a fine line. So… I’m interested in growth and
entropy. The silhouette is important because of its location in time.
I’m interested in construction and destruction, which are maybe not so
much fine-line but are definitely opponents of one another. I’m
interested in both those aspects—growth/entropy and construction/destruction—in relation to nature. And then I’m interested in architecture, but architecture and nature are opposites of each other and cohorts to each other. So the content of my work has to do with those things and just describing the either/or.

…Recently
it’s taken on a bit more of a political context, but all those issues
still deal with the initial issues I mentioned. Repercussions of war
are obviously going to be to some extent growth and entropy, and
construction and destruction; or destruction and then construction [Both Laugh]. So it makes sense that some of the issues in the world right now would
play into the work. And to a smaller extent the fence-line has been a
slow, reoccurring idea in the work as a symbol of this fine line. In
some works there are situations where there’s a fence that’s keeping
something from something else, or enshrining something.

SC: Contained and expansive spaces…

 
MZ:
Right, I’ve made paintings with forests of dead trees behind a man-made
wooden fence, in front of which sit palettes of fresh-cut wood. So
there are fine lines there. And I’m hoping that people will catch those
things and read that into the work. Overall the consensus I get from
people is we love you’re work, but we don’t know what the hell it’s
about. And that’s okay; eventually people will start to get it. The
content is exciting to me because it’s really about Nothing.
It’s about this space in-between and I like that space; it’s more
interesting to me than the "this" or the "that". So I’d like to continue to be entrenched in that gap in-between, and see what I can pull out of my hat.

SC:
Obviously for me it’s a mark of a considered work that it’s not an
effortless read. At the same time there is a difference between layered
and buried, and on many levels the nuance and complexity of your work
is sort of hidden in plain sight. The ideas are there in the
images, you’re not specifying how they’re going to come through or work
out, but you’re putting the concepts out there…

 
MZ:
Well that’s the great lesson from Rauschenberg, right? He puts the
images out there, and we give them meaning. And then people accuse him,
‘No, but you’re the one choosing the images’, and he says, ‘Well, not really, you guys are choosing the images—because those are the images that are available.’
And in some ways I believe that. But in another way, the other thing he
did was decide what images he put next to each other. It’s like what
colors do you put next to each other, whether it’s a symbol or color
they’re going to do something when they react. So I think about that a
lot. I have signature things that repeat, but when I’m putting them
together I’m thinking about their reaction to each other—in combination.

SC:
That’s a critical lead, combination. Because you’re dealing with all
these dichotomies, these contradictory forces, which are essentially
interdependent, reciprocal, parts of a whole… And a major means of
conveying this, really a key concept throughout your work, is
juxtaposition; which is a very specific term. Something I’m
particularly interested in, in terms of juxtaposition, is its
relationship in your work to this idea of negation, or "forcing negations"
as you wrote. Which I see as having a lot to do with treading that
line, because if you go one way or the other you create extreme
oppositions, and that’s decidedly not what you’re doing.

 
MZ:
Negations, right. The most obvious one for me is the fact that as an
artist I make paintings, which are objects, and the whole weighty
history, the three-thousand pound bag you carry behind you when you
make a painting. And then as an artist I also make installations, which
have a very light bag, ten fifteen years maybe. And while I make the
object at the same time I negate it by making this ephemeral thing
that’s going to die. And within the work there’s a lot of that as
well…an image of the land or trees or nature– behind a fence. And that
has to do, in a big way, with our current attitude globally. We’re
doing that and have been doing that for a long, long time now, all over
the world, we’re going into a third century of negating the land at
every step. We’re not living with it, we’re doing things to it, or
we’re forcing it to do what we want it to do, and sometimes not even
for our survival - for aesthetic reasons. Suburbia and its history
connected issues have played into my thinking about this in the past. I
like being sort of a hatchet man by saying, "Oh, look at those trees! – Let’s chop them all down," "Oh, let’s look at this building!- Let’s tear it down," "Oh, let’s look at this expanse of land!– Lets wrap it all in fences."
I feel our situation in general is a lot like that, in our Western
experience at least. I feel I’m reflecting a lot of what’s going on and
just trying to deal with it for myself, in a… subtle way.

SC: That’s the next part I want to get to—within that, the subtlety. Your visual choices and decisions, your aesthetic, I think plays into maintaining or instilling that ambiguity.  Even how you just relayed  it, that cadence…"On one hand [upward inflection], On the other [downward inflection]," that’s very descriptive of the dynamic within the images. There’s
an equilibrium, but it’s drawn between these categorical divisions. And
to some extent, in my perception, that has to do with visual measures
of negation. You could make your pictures more violently aesthetically asserting these oppositions.

 
MZ:
Well, as I said, I’m a big believer in, at least visually, getting to
your point over time. I think I would rather be thoughtful than clever [Laughs]
and that kind of takes time. So the subtlety needs…I don’t feel that it
should be extreme. And I don’t necessarily want it to be extreme, and I
don’t necessarily think extreme images make for beautiful images that
people want to look at, or, I should say that I want to look at.

SC: Or that maybe you spend more time looking at or thinking about either, as we’ve said.

MZ: I think there’s a difference between subtlety and say pornography,
because a pornographic image whether it’s sexual or violent is shocking—but it’s fast.

SC: Exactly.

 
MZ: Where as a subtle image is slow. I like the slow one more than I like the shocking one, and I’m sure that influences my visual choices within an image.

 
SC:
I’d definitely say, as well, that subtle and slow is more challenging
in terms of creating. Again it’s a matter of exploring that line,
generating that tension, and it’s a hard line to tread…or to find, or
to keep—it’s an intricate balance.

MZ:
Something else that comes to mind when you talk about that place
in-between is that in order to be there you have to understand the
past, and being there helps you understand the future. So when you
think about that fine line it really does read like the present. You can’t be in the present, ever, because it’s fleeting.

SC: It’s impossible.

 
MZ: It’s impossible. So like the gloaming, like time, like memory …

SC: History.

 
MZ: History… all those things can be skewed or read in a different way,
misunderstood or interpreted, and that’s how we experience our present,
it’s all a series of perspectives; different points of view.

SC:
And the ambiguity is part of the present too, right? Because it’s in
flux, that’s pretty much the definition of the present. And it’s really
the only time that’s in flux, because you can’t change the past–

 
MZ: You really can’t change either/or. You don’t know the future and you can’t alter the past.

SC: You make your decisions about what it is, and that’s how you continue with it.

 
MZ:
And that’s it. So you’re on this fine line, constantly, between back
there and up there. I think about that a lot in relation to the
horizon. The fine line is our vantage point when we view the
horizon—which is the future, right? Things will be better over there or
on the other side. When you’re on a hike you’re going to that place,
you’re always moving towards it.

SC: But you never actually get there.

 
MZ:
You don’t reach it, so you’re constantly between what’s back behind you
and what’s beyond the horizon in front of you. So it has to do with
that line between things. Or that place where the cycle turns, where it
goes from being one thing to another, is that line—but it’s a cycle, so it goes back around. So,
again, that’s why nature plays into my work, and why the landscape is
somewhat important to my work, because it’s how we perceive these
things in a way.

SC: Let’s get into the why of landscape then, which is another historically weighted area, Art-wise.

 
MZ:
I guess the landscape is important to me because we live on it. In the
system we inhabit we don’t live in the sky, we don’t live in space, we
live on the land—so our relationship with it and to it is very
important. I think that all our situations as humans will always come
back to the land: what we do to the land, how we treat the land, how we
use and don’t use the land, how we destroy the land… cause we’re on it,
there’s no getting around that. So landscape plays into my work more in
a political sense than in an Arcadian sense. It’s funny because of all
the different kinds of painters to turn out to be, growing up being a
landscape painter was the least of my interests [Laughs], and I guess that’s what I am the most
is maybe a landscape painter. But I’m not interested in those general
or painterly ideas of landscape, I don’t sit around and look at
Gainsborough paintings or landscape painters from the past, that isn’t
what drives the work. The land is where stuff happens, that’s the
interest for me. And again those places, those fine lines between
nature and architecture, growth and entropy, destruction and
construction, that’s all tied to it as well.

…A major influence I didn’t mention before is The Center For Land Use Interpretation.
What’s interesting to me about this group is that they’re documenting
how we’re using the land. From the nineteenth century until now what
we’ve done to the land is really important to our survival, and our
political perspectives, our economical situation… it effects a lot of
things that aren’t necessarily thought about, I feel. And if they are, they’re not thought about in the same way that I’m thinking about them [Laughs].
So that’s why I make them. That’s why the landscape plays a role in the
work. But it’s almost like this periphery, because I’m interested in
that fine line and it just so happens that line falls on the land.

SC:
How do you see your work moving forward along that line, on a broader
scope? Or a question might be is there something overall you never quite get, and that’s what keeps you working?

 
MZ:
The only thing that keeps me painting is the sense that one day I wont
have to paint. That’s what keeps me painting—trying to figure out how
I’m not going to make paintings.

SC:
Are you hoping one day to be able to achieve something that gets beyond
Painting, or beyond the need to qualify it as  such.

 
MZ: I’d like to get to the point where I don’t need Painting.

SC: Painting or paint?

 
MZ:
Painting. The act of painting is a way of making an artwork, but there
are many different ways of making an artwork. And this all comes out of
the artists I’m interested in, a great majority of whom make paintings
but they’re not painters—there’s
something interesting to me in that situation, how does one attain
that? And the only way I can think of doing it right now is to bring
myself to that point where the ideas I’m dealing with eventually push
me to not necessarily need to make paintings to deal with them. Or maybe in dealing with those ideas I’m going to constantly push myself

to make paintings. But that reluctance to be categorized as one thing or the other I think helps keep what I make…good.

SC: I agree.

 
MZ:
I don’t want to have a bag of tricks, and I don’t want to make the same
paintings or only make paintings. It’s simplistic in some sense. And a
lot of people have said to me, "Well, just don’t make paintings, make
something else." But it’s not that simple for me. I don’t think there’s
much other explanation than that I just have to continue on this track
until the things that come to mind allow for something else to happen.
Obviously I don’t think my subject matter is going to change. I think
the strength of my work is only going to come out of keeping that
content the same and exploring it to an incredible, detailed
microscopic and macroscopic level. It’s ambiguous enough of a content
to be able to allow a lot different things.

SC:
I think the significance is in your giving two options to the
progression. In that the image right now insists you use paint, or
maybe because painting is the medium you work in you can’t necessarily
separate that from how the images surface. But the fact that you’re
pushing it in increments outside of this, and also not negating the
idea that it could stay within painting, that it could be one or the
other—thats vital.

 
MZ:
The only way to really contribute to the discussions that have gone on
historically is to question the discussions that have gone on
historically. Right now, I happen to find myself as a painter. The only
way I’m going to contribute anything to Painting, so to speak, is to
question it extensively and maybe be skeptical of it for myself. How
else am I going to say anything about it if I’m not questioning it’s
structure or how it works? And you’re talking to me only after five
years of production, who knows what the next five years will bring,
what the next twenty years will bring. I don’t know. I have an idea,
but I don’t know. All I can do is what I’m doing now. And the
questioning of it is really important to me because it’s the only
thing, I think, that will allow me to get better at how I do what I do.