In Conversation: John Baldessari & Jeremy Blake

ArtForum, March, 2004 by Tim Griffin

JEREMY BLAKE: Bill Gates might have to cut off his ear and send it to you now ... [Laughter.] Yeah, there was an idea floating around for a while that I somehow had something to do with the "technologization" of art or that I thought of it as a technical progression. That was really off, because I think about technology kind of the way a musician thinks about an instrument. Given all of the cool things happening in music and film, most people's thinking in the art world about the aesthetic potential of technology is still surprisingly passive. Even now, I think some critics have problems with the work because it's like the "paintings" are talking back.

But on a more subjective level, if my work has anything to do with a fantasy about technology, it's a slightly nostalgic one. In Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, you see Julie Christie in her apartment at the mercy of a, well, basically a flat screen, with kaleidoscopic, hypnotic projections being piped in from an all-powerful regime that has burned books and provided instead a kind of insidious abstract entertainment. When I was a student I saw that and thought, What a great comment on abstraction. What a weird, uncanny, dystopic potential for abstraction. I wanted to make paintings like that. But I couldn't make paintings like that, because paintings only move so much.

JOHN BALDESSARI: There is a kind of seamlessness to your work. I guess you do a dissolve, while I do a jump cut.

JEREMY BLAKE: I hope it is seamless. For me, the dissolve is a device that formally supports time-based abstract imagery. The philosophical discussion around painted abstraction has, I think, deteriorated lately, leaving abstraction as a kind of style. I want abstraction to be more than a style, or a backdrop, so I try to build a context for it in my work--often I make a kind of fantasy architecture to house the abstraction.

For example, the "Winchester" films I've made deal with a mansion built during the late 1800s, early 1900s by the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune. She married into the family, but her husband and daughter died early; in her grief she visited a spiritualist, who said she was being haunted by the spirits of all those killed by the guns and she needed to build a house to accommodate them. So for thirty years, she was constantly building the good-spirits rooms and facilities. I'm taking a space that, in theory, is haunted, and using time-based abstraction to demonstrate that haunting. The dissolves relate to the return of the repressed, which undermines everything that seems solid. And these abstract passages allow you to process the violence done by the gun, the fear that made the gun seem necessary in the first place--the violent act of going West--and trying to present those things as if they're fresh. I mean, this mythology isn't dead. Every time we go to war we lean back on this wobbly logic of cowboys and Indians.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

JOHN BALDESSARI: If there was something I recognized in the piece that I try for in my own work, it was that it traverses a kind of visual music, moving the viewer's eye and slowing it down.