The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art defies the normal boundary between landing and gallery at the entrance to the fourth floor space that houses Sharon Lockhart’s "Lunch Break," 2008. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, ©2011, with permission of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The stairway to the fourth floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art leads me directly toward a long, narrow, darkened space, at the end of which is the image of another, much longer, passageway. In that image, a concrete floor below and light fixtures above trace a trajectory toward infinity punctuated by pipes, wires, hoses, storage boxes, tools, and lockers. The scene is not monochrome—red, blue, yellow, orange, and green are common—nor is it dark, but the fluorescent lights, the faded floor, the absent windows, and the constrained path—no more than five feet wide—suggest that this as a place to travel through, not a place in which to settle.

This sensation is amplified by the fact that the image, I slowly realize, is moving. Inch-by-inch down the corridor, the slow-motion journey of what turns out to be Sharon Lockhart’s film, Lunch Break (2008), might be confused with a series of stills.

Still image from Sharon Lockhart, “Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, November 5, 2007, Bath, Maine),” 2008; 35mm film transferred to HD, 80 min.; courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; © Sharon Lockhart.

Lockhart, who says she is interested in “duration,” describes her method of filmmaking as “photographic.”[1] Despite appearances, the film is not typical slow-motion; Lockhart has digitally inserted eight repetitions of each frame, ballooning a 10-minute, 1,200-foot traverse into an 80-minute encounter. It is a film engaged in repeating moments, in suspending, not slowing, time. It asks me, in effect, to witness the moment once, and then again, and then again. It proposes that I might answer the question “What do you see?” only by pondering yet another, “Do you see what you see?”

All of a sudden, a person moves, and I recognize the objects dangling off a storage bin down the corridor as human legs. In this otherworldly place, everything that seems obvious at conventional speed becomes a mystery, a puzzle to be solved only by the closest attention. A young man with short blond hair in a white jumpsuit raises his hand to his forehead, or more precisely, raises———–his———-hand———-to———-his———–forehead, where the hand rests for two minutes of my time, or only about 10 seconds of his time. His hand settles back in his lap, and he looks down. Is this a moment of despair? As the blond man turns toward me, I recognize a gently waving hand below him. The hand is speaking, and it is attached to the green hoodie of another man. I assume the co-workers are friends; I want them to be friends. There is something emphatic in the gesture of the green-shirted man, something that could be advice or reprimand. The blond man’s lips part briefly. Then he turns away and looks down for what seems to be an eternity. Is he pensive or despondent? His hand returns to his forehead. The camera inches onward, never turning. There in front of me, two distinctive characters in a distinct place have enacted a story with no ending, one of some two dozen the procession reveals. Were the men talking about a spouse, a boss, a co-worker, a sports team, or the union? Were they complaining or sharing a story? Was the hand to the head about despair, exhaustion, a thought, or an itch?

Installation View of Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 15,2011—January 16, 2012, showing entrance to the film screening gallery (left), the neighboring gallery with a series of lunch-related photographs, and a pile of Lunch Break Times—Bay Area Edition, the 24-page tabloid newspaper Lockhart produced in San Francisco for this show. Photo: Johnna Arnold Photography.

It turns out that although this place looks like a passageway, it functions as a destination, a place for moving in rather than moving through. The film documents shipbuilders at the Bath Iron Works in Maine during the moments when they are not building ships. The procession down the hallway reveals one “all of a sudden” after another, its repeating moments of apparent stillness both facilitating contemplation and kindling suspense. I cannot make out the messages of these subdued bodies: body language needs the fluidity of its natural pace to achieve clarity. Further, the slow-motion procession foils the normal capacity to anticipate a movement the moment before it happens. I cannot join the rhythm of life in the corridor, and everything—a woman biting a sandwich, a man microwaving popcorn, a hand brushing a knee—becomes a riddle. While ordinarily I might compensate for these limitations through closer inspection, I cannot manage this: the procession, while inching, is inexorable, and the camera’s wide-angle frontward gaze, while inclusive, is unyielding.

The beauty of Lunch Break is that its attenuated moments make it difficult to lock onto a single interpretation: the slow shifting disturbs the storyline, twists it into another shape. I cannot resolve what has happened between the two men, but the film incubates a dozen possible answers, confounding the normal snap of my judgments. I have witnessed not simply the recorded event, but also the event of my own wondering, the activity of my imagination, which is often unconscious, extending over time. Lockhart has found a way to viscerally demonstrate the elasticity of the temporal-spatial experience. The event of the two men has taken only five minutes of my time, the camera traversing only 50 feet of corridor. Yet, within these repeated moments and movements, Lockhart has packed the narrative of a short story, one of many in the bursting anthology that comprises Lunch Break.

Still image from Sharon Lockhart, “Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, November 5, 2007, Bath, Maine),” 2008; 35mm film transferred to HD, 80 min.; courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; © Sharon Lockhart.

The word “duration” refers to the period of time it takes for an event to occur, but I cannot sever its kinship to “endurance.” Both words stem from durus, Latin for “hard.” As I sat down to watch Lunch Break, I intended to stay, to endure, but I anticipated that the 80-minute experience would demand a sacrifice that would exceed my capacities. SFMoMA Curator of Media Arts, Rudolf Frieling, says of the experience, “The viewer’s attention and perception are constantly at work,”[1] meaning that Lockhart’s film forces the viewer not only to attend to things that he or she might normally overlook, but also to attend to attention, to perceive perception happening. There were moments when this was exhausting. In fact, the film asks me to perform the very labor the workers will soon resume: a repetitive effort. It was, however, never boring.

Lockhart gets to the crux of the activity common to both workers and viewers: the skill, ingenuity, and variation at the core of undertakings usually dismissed as trivial or onerous simply because they are repetitive. I cannot claim that my attention never wavered, only that Lunch Break inevitably rewarded the patient process of discovery. If speed seems to be the bugaboo of our age, critiqued for its narcotic-like capacity to gratify a sensation-seeking society’s desire for stimulation, then slowness, particularly as it unfolds here, offers another avenue toward the great rumbling revelation of experience: an opening—one story after another—into the expansive world of the imagination.

Sharon Lockhart, “Dirty Don’s Delicious Dogs,” 2008; chromogenic print; 41 1/16 x 51 1/16 in. (left), and “Gary Gilpatrick, Insulator,” 2008; chromogenic print; 24 3/4 x 30 3/4 in. (right), both courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Gladstone Gallery, New York, and neugerriemschneider, Berlin; © Sharon Lockhart

It seems accurate to say, as one description does, that “Lunch Break’s gradual passage through the aged factory offers a meditative and melancholic reflection on the architectural, social and phenomenological space of a notably anachronistic mode of industrialized labor.”[2] And I might easily reflect—as Lockhart did during her gallery talk—upon the bookends that coincidentally bracket Lunch Break’s making and showing: the real estate bubble’s pop in 2007, and the union rupture in Wisconsin and the Occupy movement, both in 2011. But what is it about the film itself—rather than my projections about its subject—that evokes melancholy? It is true that the corridor is filled neither with laughter nor even many smiles. One man stretches, perhaps relieving an ache; a woman stares, perhaps fatigued; many read silently, as unanimated as the figures in the Duane Hanson sculpture that initially inspired Lockhart.[3] It may well be that melancholy unavoidably surfaces in this claustrophobic underground world, but it may also be that the restraint and deliberation of Lockhart’s procession forces me to consider not only the practices of perception and attention, but also those of reflection and judgment. Although the film inevitably raises associations to the conditions of factory labor, I found myself suspending—far more often than reaching—easy conclusions.[4]

Lunch break, indeed.

[2]Harvard Film Archive “Timestage. The Cinema of Sharon Lockhart,” 2009 [accessed October 19, 2011]. ”Anachronistic” may reflect both an actual trend toward automation and, particularly in industries like shipbuilding, a fantasy of completely automated processes that discounts the persistence of human labor.

[3]Lockhart’s triptych, Lunch Break Installation, “Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life,” 14, December – 23 February 2003, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2003), documented the installation of Hanson’s Lunch Break (Three Workers with Scaffold) (1989). Lockhart’s photographs of live workers installing fiberglass ones marked the beginning of the project that resulted in Lunch Break, the film.

[4]Among these associations are: contemporary globalization and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs; 19^th-century industrialization, the conditions of factory work, and, ironically, the increasing automation of manufacturing; and the work ethic itself.

Woodman most often acted as her own model, and the small black-and-white compositions, usually nudes, are visually straightforward but conceptually complex.  What complicates the work is the knowledge that Woodman is not just the vulnerable nude, but also the architect of that condition.  In many photos Woodman’s gaze is directed at the viewer; and yet knowing she was also the photographer mediates that directness, because ultimately what her model-self was looking at was her photographer-self, backwards through the lens of the camera, posing for her own view.  In this way, she was able to explore her femininity as a construct of at least partially her own making, bringing a feminist awareness to her investigations.

Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 5 1/4 in. x 5 1/4 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Take, for example, Polka Dots (1976).  Wearing a spotted dress, Woodman crouches against a decaying, dilapidated wall.  Over her head there is a fist-sized hole punched through the plaster and lath.   Similarly, her dress is unzipped at the side, revealing part of her torso and the curve of her left breast.  Splayed fingers hide her mouth, heightening the vulnerability of her posture and semi-nakedness, and her messy hair corresponds to the ruined nature of the room.  Her awkward, submissive pose and undone dress belong to a madwoman—but her eyes are not crazy, they are guiltily sexual.  They dare the viewer to compare the hole in her garment to the hole in the wall and to see how they might be similar.  And yet the title is neutral, focusing coyly on the pattern of the dress and the concurrent black spots on the wall, redirecting the viewer to the composition as a whole and reflecting the conceptual slyness of the work.  Contradictions and ambiguity create depth as Woodman refuses to provide an easy summary of femininity or desire.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979-1980. Gelatin silver print, 3 7/8 in. x 3 7/8 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Woodman’s understanding of formal compositions was truly remarkable for someone so young.  Consider Untitled, New York (1979-1980), in which a nude body reclines on a striped mattress.  Echoing ancient Roman and Greek statues, the head is missing, cut off by the camera’s framing. The clean, bold stripes of the sheet direct the eye across the width of the photo, providing a strong horizontal pattern that is softened by the zigzagging line of the torso and knees.  Gentle folds in the flesh at the waist echo the soft ripples in the fabric.  An open barrette scattered on the sheet implies the sensuality of unbound hair that the viewer can’t see, yet the idea of that looseness is physically present in the undone fabric billowing from under the bed’s front edge. Two mysterious black disks lie near the ribcage, like pupils, alluding to sight. The configuration of elements appears intuitive, but the many correspondences indicate that it was very carefully composed.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 5 1/4 in. x 5 5/16 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Identity is the main issue that arises repeatedly in Woodman’s work.  If she is located in front of and behind the camera simultaneously, then her sense of self is similarly flexible.  Nowhere is this idea more apparent than in Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island (1976) in which three naked women stand in a row in a dilapidated room. Each woman holds a photograph of Woodman’s face in front of her own visage.  The posture of the two women on the left indicates that their hidden faces are turned to each other behind the photographic facades.  The third woman, however, faces the camera.  Comparing this woman’s body to the other photographs in the exhibition, the viewer can deduce that this is Woodman herself, cheekily replacing her own face with a representation that claims to be her.  This tableau is further complicated by a fourth photo of Woodman’s face tacked to the wall, and by the paint that divides the wall horizontally making the row of women into an ersatz police lineup.  There are four Francescas in the room: which one is the criminal, which the innocent, or even the “real”?  Further, each woman is naked, but her face—the principle social marker of her individuality—is concealed, questioning what constitutes feminine identification.  Woodman’s own pose, leaning toward the viewer in knee socks and Mary Janes, seems to say you can see me naked, but I am unrevealed; exposed, I am protected.

Woodman committed suicide at the age of 22, and it would be easy to let this cast a pall over her work, robbing it of its sly humor and replacing its youthful sincerity with something darker. Knowing this fact, her nude body can suddenly look isolated, her propositions for selfhood change from playfully unfixed to confused, her blacks even more opaque than before.  But subjecting her oeuvre to armchair psychology is the wrong strategy: it’s too convenient to attribute her imaginative choices to the facile cliché of the tortured artist.  Although her photographs expose her physical body and her thoughts to a public audience, it is in the privacy of the darkroom that I imagine her: coaxing an image from light and shadows, sliding paper into chemical trays, bringing an ever-changing idea of herself to life, over and over again.

Four video installations comprise Architecture of Narrative, the exhibition of work by Belgian artist David Claerbout, currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition’s title underscores the presiding concerns in Claerbout’s study of cinema; he strips his videos of conventions such as plot, character development, and in some cases, action and instead places emphasis on light, sound, and setting. He juxtaposes chronological time against cinematic time, freezing and repeating a single moment so that a scene progresses through a series of vantage points but never forward. In three of the videos, individuals are arrested in position and held captive in a Sisyphean interlude, while space, sound, and time slip past them. More significant than the dissection of cinematic conventions, however, are the negotiations with power that Claerbout creates for viewers.

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Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in bed, New York City, 1983; detail from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; 1979-1996; nine-carousel projection with approximately 700 slides, soundtrack, and titles; dimensions variable; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; © Nan Goldin; image: courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Bean Gilsdorf: Exposed was ten years in the making. How and why did it begin?

Sandra Phillips: I did a show called Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence about twelve years ago because I was very interested in the fact that we ascribe a certain amount of authority to photographs as impartial truth-telling documents. But they can be extremely ambiguous. And it occurred to me that there was another aspect that was about making pictures without people knowing that they were being photographed. There are, in fact, some spy pictures in this show. So that’s how I started.

BG: Did your organization of this show start with any particular pieces? Or was it just a general concept?

SP: It started as an idea, and the beginning of it was looking at the work of Edgar Degas, believe it or not! He was very interested in photography and he made a lot of photographs. He made pictures of his models that he arranged, but they were presented as though they were spied on. I thought that was completely fascinating—why would someone as important as he be interested in the use of photography as a spying medium? It had to do with his own personal aesthetic, but once you get started in that, then you realize how amazingly broad this topic is.

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1969; gelatin silver print; 11 x 14 in. (27.94 x 35.56 cm); Collection SFMOMA, fractional and promised gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein; © Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

SP: I also looked at the work of Helen Levitt, and she was interested in making pictures of people who didn’t realize that they were being photographed. So all of a sudden, this idea expanded: how do you explain street photography without actually dealing with the surveillance aspect of it? And then it became a very big subject: it wasn’t only street photography, it’s the ways we look at sex, the ways we understand important people, and then this weird territory where people like celebrities are being aggressively looked at. What does that mean to us as a culture? Where does this come from? Examining the interest that we have in violence is a necessary part of modern life. And the contemporary photographs are all about surveillance, obviously.

BG: Do you think there’s any correspondence between the gesture of taking a photograph of someone who is not looking, and staging a photograph to appear as though someone is not looking?

SP: …Oh, yeah…

BG: I’m thinking of all the Facebook photos—those self-portraits—where people specifically look away from the camera as though they had been caught unawares. What do you think is behind that?

SP: It’s an affect, that we want to be photographed as though it’s real, but it’s actually not real. I think this is the big issue now in photography, whether it’s staged or isn’t staged. It comes back to the idea of photography being a medium of truth telling. It’s a very interesting medium; it seems absolutely clear and yet is so mysterious.

BG: I find it interesting that this exhibition came from England, where surveillance culture is just outrageous. Do you know what the reaction was, over there?

SP: It was tremendously interesting to the English for that very reason. The Tate is a much more public institution than almost any other institution in the world, it has millions of visitors a year. And I can’t remember how many millions of people came to see the show, but it was huge, there was a lot of discussion about it. There was another show about surveillance [Rhetorics of Surveillance: from Bentham to Big Brother at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe] about ten years ago in Germany and it was very theoretical. But in England they have the whole craze, really, for outfitting public spaces with surveillance cameras. There was a child in Scotland who was abducted and killed by two older kids, and that’s what started it all. It was before the al Qaida bombings, it was before all of that. It wasn’t political; the idea was purely to save children’s lives, that’s where it started.

Tazio Secchiaroli, Anita Ekberg and Husband Anthony Steel, Vecchia Roma, 1958; gelatin silver print; 11 11/16 x 14 5/8 in. (29.69 x 37.15 cm); Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Tazio Secchiaroli / David Secchiaroli.

BG: Which is different from what’s happening right now. On one hand we want to have our personal privacy—when we dictate it!—but on the other hand we want to look as though we’ve been caught on camera in some “real” moment. How do you tease those apart? It’s so complicated, this relationship that we have to an image of ourselves.

SP: Yes, it’s extremely strange.

BG: Are there any pieces in the exhibition that embody what you want people to take away from this?

SP: The Degas picture. And, obviously people like Weegee play an enormous role here. And there are certainly pictures that mean a lot to me. The early photograph by Paul Strand of the man who’s sitting on the sidewalk, a poor man, on the street in New York. He’s revealing his inner dislocation or inner anxiety…it’s a picture of someone’s raw psychological anxiety. It’s a very moving picture, done by a guy who was trying to learn about Cubism and elevate photography to a formalist practice. And, at the same time he’s making these pictures of very poor people on the streets without their knowledge of it. That, I would say, is a touchstone.

* * *

*Exposed was conceived by Sandra Phillips and co-curated with Tate curator of photography Simon Baker.

In the 1950s, San Francisco poet Jack Spicer wrote that he considered a collection of poems to be a community meant to “echo and re-echo against each other.” A quick look at R.H. Quaytman’s new installation, I Love — The Eyelid Clicks / I See / Cold Poetry, Chapter 18, created just for SFMOMA, assures us that the analogy holds for a collection of paintings, too. Perhaps this is the reason that Quaytman and curator Apsara diQuinzio settled on Spicer as a guidepost for the exhibition.

Quaytman works primarily as a painter, but her installations are site-based and could in many ways be considered sculpture. Images are meant to “echo” — to complement and conflict with each other, and with the architecture of the room. The paintings in Quaytman’s one room show-within-a-show at the Whitney Biennial last spring stunningly incorporated one of the Whitney’s trapezoidal windows as a visual motif, making the actual window look like a trompe l’oeil painting.

With the SFMOMA show, Quaytman is again confined to a single room, a constraint that works well for her. The colors are subdued: a pastel pink just beyond cream and plenty of shades of gray. Using SFMOMA’s photo archive, Quaytman silk-screens images onto beveled, wooden panels of various sizes. The images are somehow relevant to Spicer’s work, although I’m fuzzy on the details: a snake, a creased photograph of a young man, a tripod, and a set of moons. Despite this specificity, the show is not drastically different from other Quaytman shows; while she works in “chapters” and uses specific people — like Spicer — as a way to dive into her work, her formal and conceptual concerns remain constant — and exquisite.

Techniques you’re more-or-less guaranteed to see from Quaytman include parallel lines so closely placed that they shimmer and pain the eyes, paint mixed with crushed glass, and every once and a while a flash of bright, bold color like florescent yellow or magenta. Perspective shifts and jarring juxtapositions between flat, geometric designs and representational images with deep space are par for the course, and most horizon lines lead you to a vanishing point that is off the canvas or in between two works. Shapes repeat, including a realistic representation of the edge of the wooden panels, an effect that serves to remind us that the paintings are objects, not just images.

Stare at any one painting for too long and the danger is retinal burn. The silhouette of a snake surrounded by a sea of sparkling turquoise remains as I blink my way around the room. The clutter in my retinal field builds, disperses, and builds again. Across the room is another painting with the same snake, larger and not in silhouette. Its pebbly skin is visible, and it becomes tangled with the afterimage of its cousin. There are two paintings that contain actual poems by Spicer. Each poem is placed central to its canvas, and yet each is downright painful to look at. Quaytman’s closely-placed lines prevent the text from dominating the image, although when you do manage to lock onto a poem and read it, everything in the periphery melts away.

“The poem begins to mirror itself,” writes Spicer. Poems mirror poems. Paintings mirror paintings. Images appear, accumulate and disperse, only to reappear. Jack Spicer passed away in 1965, but the rhythm and resonance of Quaytman’s installation is a reminder of more than the man. It’s a reminder of the cycling complexity of time in all its invisible and visible moments.

New Work: R.H. Quaytman is on view at through January 16, 2011 at SFMOMA.

Mika Rottenberg, Squeeze (still), 2010; Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery/Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery; photo: Henry Prince

In this new video, Rottenberg continues her investigation into social and labor-based inequalities through a fragmented narrative. The grotesquely seductive video equally binds and separates the concept of labor with gender, class, and race, seamlessly merging the real with the hyper-fictional. Interlocking environments slide in and out of place. Exaggerated sounds of cutting, slicing and crunching divide and define the separate worlds, and rich, fleshy color pull them all back together. Similar to her past work, Squeeze maintains an all woman cast of characters played by non-actors, where the physical characteristics of Rottenberg’s women parallel their occupation within the awkwardly constructed environment. Women working in a rubber plant in India, mining the trees for raw substance, interact with an all female work force at a lettuce farm in Arizona. These two real worlds collide with the fictional factory constructed in the artist’s studio, serving as the main link between all of the spaces in constant flux. Walls move, floors drop, and characters blindly connect to the factory to create a new hybrid consumer product turned art-object, which is composed of blush that is squeezed from the skin of a woman in the factory, rubber, and decomposing lettuce.

Through a beautifully non-linear story, Rottenberg’s use of the absurd confronts the seriousness of her content, mesmerizing the viewer by slowly releasing a delicate flow of information through color, sound and rhythm. Each element quietly underscores the disconnect between the consumer and the production process innate to mass commerce. What results is a world which mirrors her role as a woman creating an art object, and our daily lives of utilizing a variety of products, many of which are produced through the work of people who are socially, politically, and racially removed from the consumer. Yet, while the work is far from generous, the artist subtly reminds us that we can never really separate ourselves from the lives of others no matter how distant or disconnected we would like for them to be.

La correspondance (Correspondence), 1985. 31.5 x 47.5 inches (80 x 120 cm). © Luc Tuymans. Image via the excellent Luc Tuymans, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, ISBN 978-1-933045-98-6.

“I stopped painting from 1981 to 1985 because it became too suffocating and too existential. And somebody by accident shoved a Super-8 camera in my hands and I started to film. And then I came back. Making images is important in the sense that you need distance.”

“This was the first painting made after the film adventure [above]. And it’s actually one of my most conceptual works, and it’s based upon an anecdote. The anecdote is from a Dutch writer who was stationed in the Dutch Embassy from 1905 to 1910. And he didn’t have enough money to bring his wife over to Berlin. And in those days you had the grand cafes with very bourgeois interiors, and also postcards taken of them. So every time he went to eat in such places he bought a postcard, and with a red pencil he crossed out the table at which he had eaten, and he sent it to his wife during the duration of five years. So that’s why it’s called correspondence. It’s also the idea of persistence, and homesickness without an end.”

Die Wiedergutmachung (Reparations), 1989. 17.75 x 21.625, 15 x 17.75 inches (45 x 55, 38 x 45 cm). © Luc Tuymans. Image via the excellent Luc Tuymans, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, ISBN 978-1-933045-98-6.

“This is something I saw on television. It’s called the Weidergutmachung, and it’s about the woman who made the documentary, it was made in ’89, which is when I saw the documentary on the West German television. It was quite an interesting documentary because Weidergutmachung means the pay-back system towards the people who suffered in the concentration camps…this time not the Jewish people, but Gypsy twins on which the German doctors in the concentration camps had experimented. These people were never paid back because the guy who was actually responsible for the whole situation of the repayment was also a doctor who himself experimented on them during the times he was working in the concentration camp. When he dies off in ’83 in his bureau drawer, the woman who was making the documentary found contact prints of disengaged eyeballs and hands. So this is what I saw on the television screen. It was such a poignant element that I turned it into a more organic imagery.”

Gaskamer (Gas Chamber), 1986; oil on canvas; 24 x 32 1/2 in. (61 x 82.5 cm); The Over Holland Collection. In honor of Caryl Chessman; © Luc Tuymans; photo: Peter Cox, courtesy The Over Holland Collection

“The most problematic painting that I ever painted—that I ever will paint as long as I live, probably—is the Gas Chamber. The Gas Chamber was derived from a visit to in Dachau where you have a real gas chamber and not a replica. And I stood in it, and I made a watercolor when I visited it, and for years this watercolor was on the floor of my studio, which made the color of the paper yellow. And I also made it on a frame that is deliberately not straight. It’s a metonymous image, because without the words of the title it would be completely without effect, it would be just a painting. Nevertheless, it shows the triviality of that type of horror. At the time of its use, it was masked as a place where you could get a shower. All the elements of perspective are taken out, in order to get to this feeling of claustrophobic existence. I mean, a lot of times the Germans say, ‘We can’t deal with that type of history as the Holocaust,’ but I’m not agreeing with that, it is part of the culture… This remains a very difficult and ambiguous painting.”

The Flag, 1995. 54.375 x 30.75 inches (138.1 x 78.1 cm). © Luc Tuymans. Image via the excellent Luc Tuymans, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, ISBN 978-1-933045-98-6.

“This was from a show about Flemish nationalism in my hometown, where at that point (luckily not anymore) there was the biggest concentration of the right-wing political party called the Flemish Bloc. So I thought I would start with their icons. This is the Belgian lion. The Belgian lion normally is a lion on a yellow backdrop with red claws. To enlighten you about the history of Flanders is going to take us very long, because it’s a long story to begin with, but anyway, to give you an idea…During the first world war, all the officers were French speaking. This meant that during the First World War a lot of Belgian people died in that war, millions of them. The people who were the soldiers, the foot guys, they were all Flemish; there were huge massacres, because when the officers would say a gauche [French: left], they would go right, into the machine fire. In between the two world wars there was a closeness in terms of culture to the German culture, more than to the French culture. And that ended up in a collaboration with the Germans. So a very difficult situation. That’s why you have a lot of marriage trouble, which I also witnessed. My mother was Dutch, they were in the resistance. My father was the Flemish side, they had collaborated. At dinner, when I was five years old, this explodes by the accidental showing up of a photograph of the guy I was named after doing the Hitler salute. You can imagine the whole situation. So what you can see here is the Flemish lion, and I just made a watercolor of it, and then I crumbled it together, and then pinned it on the wall. And then I did something I had never done before, I took a Polaroid of it, and it was such bad quality that it totally deleted the imagery, which is actually beautiful I think. And this was the first time I used Polaroid as a device to derive imagery.”

Ballroom Dancing, 2005; oil on canvas; 62 1/4 x 40 3/4 (158 x 103.5); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, fractional and promised gift of Shawn and Brook Byers; © Luc Tuymans

“This was painted out of my disgust with the Bush legislation. The first idea I had was this: I was thinking of this element of regression in American society in those days, going back to an open form of conservatism, and therefore Fred Astaire, Ginger Rodgers. Ballroom dancing. So then I was on the web browsing, trying to find more contemporary imagery, and in 2005 there was the Texas Governor’s ball, this is the Texas seal, the woman swings her head out, this guy is the epitome of well-behaved and whatever. And on the other hand, this is an image that’s really classical, I really loved doing it…”

The Secretary of State, 2005; oil on canvas; 18 x 24 1/4 in. (45.7 x 61.5 cm); Collection the Museum of Modern Art, New York, promised gift of David and Monica Zwirner; courtesy David Zwirner, New York; © Luc Tuymans

“…Then, one of my best friends who used to be the Minster of Foreign Affairs, made a remark of Condoleeza Rice—I was in a bar, reading this in a newspaper—there was a day Condoleeza Rice came and visited our country, and he said something like, “She is very intelligent, and she is not unpretty.” And this sexist remark led to my idea of Condoleeza Rice. The interesting point is that she is depicted not to be judged, she is depicted with great determination. At that point no one knew what the woman was going to achieve.”

Ewan Gibbs, San Francisco, 2009; graphite on paper, 11 11/16 x 8 1/4 in.; Commissioned by SFMOMA; © Ewan Gibbs; photo: courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Bean Gilsdorf: How long have you been drawing?

Ewan Gibbs: I started making the work that was the origin of this in 1993, when I was twenty. I came across this language based on knitting patterns and I knew then that this was the thing I was going to do.

BG: When you say “language based on knitting patterns”, what do you mean?

EG: Basically, I had been making paintings that were quite derivative of Lichtenstein: acrylic, flat color, black outline. I was very interested in interiors, but I just felt like it was all too derivative. I was almost paralyzed by the possibilities that were out there. And I just stopped doing anything—it’s a weird place to be, but typical of being a student—and then I found a book on knitting patterns where there’s a grid, and different marks determine what color [yarn] you use.

BG: And what was it that drew you to that?

EG: Well, it’s a functional language, but it can also be quite naturalistic. [In the patterns] they use a darker mark to describe darker areas. There was a practicality, it had another purpose other than as just a drawing. I had people make me needlepoints based on my drawings and I made a couple, as well.

BG: But you didn’t find that satisfying?

EG: I found it very satisfying, but it became a political issue of, “Why is a man doing this?” I wasn’t interested in trying to make some comment about craft, or something that’s traditionally seen as a female thing. Painting and drawing was what I was interested in. So I took an Edward Hopper painting, and I took the knitting pattern—a found image and a found language—and I put them together. It was a way of going back to square one to build my confidence. Then I decided to go into a holiday shop [a travel agency], and I got all the brochures and cut out thousands of these tiny pictures of hotel rooms. They were ready-made images, and they were free. I would never crop them. I thought, “There’s an element here that’s very subjective, I have to choose one, but once I’ve chosen, the composition is fixed.” It eliminated all that subjectivity so that I could function.

BG: How do you achieve the different gradations in the work?

EG: In the pen drawings, there are five different nib sizes, so I’m just picking up a different nib. There are only five variables for any square. In pencil, I’ve got ten different kinds of pencils, and each pencil I can use hard, light, or medium; so then I’ve got thirty different variables. One of the difficulties of what I do, or skills, is to be consistent over a few weeks, to make the same decisions and use the same pressure, so I don’t end up with a stripy picture that looks like a Xerox that’s running out of ink. I firmly believe I could teach anyone to do it, there’s a logic to it.

BG: What determines the scale, if you are working from very small images?

EG: Originally, the source image was about two inches square and I blew it up to the size of the paper. When I started you didn’t have digital photography or home printers, so I’d go to a Xerox shop. Now I take my own photos and print off the exact size I want. I still use A4 paper, which is the most familiar-sized paper, it’s the size of your head, there’s an intimacy. I have no interest in doing a massive one in some bombastic way to impress a crowd. I don’t want people to go, “Wow, that must have taken forever!”

BG: People say that already!

EG: They might, but then I say, “It only takes two weeks,” and they say, “Oh, that’s not that long.” Also, every bit of effort I make is visible, so it’s really economical in terms of effort. We’re fascinated with “work” in art, but it’s so often out of sight. But I can make one mark in one square and it takes a certain amount of time. Multiply that by the total number of marks, and that’s how long it took.

BG: Some of your marks are like counting, they’re like the hatch marks a prisoner makes to mark time.

EG: Yeah, definitely. I was looking for a practice that would…not kill time or waste time, but spend time. Not that I’m interested in labor intensity for the sake of it. The reward in the end is the final image. It’s kind of like, “Look after the pennies and the pounds take care of themselves”—you look after each unit, be diligent and rigorous, and you end up with a naturalistic image. And it’s almost as if these things have made themselves.

Ewan Gibbs, San Francisco, 2009; graphite on paper, 11 11/16 x 8 1/4 in.; Commissioned by SFMOMA; © Ewan Gibbs; photo: courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

BG: Do you feel like your work has a connection to mapping, or is it closer to photography?

EG: I’ve never really thought of it in terms of mapping. And I’m not trying mimic photography, I’m trying to take the best parts of photography, like the naturalism that we accept as the most developed way to view the world. I don’t want someone to see my work and think, “Oh, is that a photograph?” When you get up there you see the marks, they’re very evident. With photography you get up close and there’s so much information. With my drawings you stand back and then you come in close to get more, and then you’re repelled again because there isn’t anything there. There’s more clarity when you stand back.

BG: You’ve had three main bodies of work, Destinations, Hotel Facades, and Typical Interiors. What’s behind that type of imagery?

EG: The interiors, I was just fascinated with the genre. But at a certain point I realized that was an easy way of making art-historical references, and kind of lazy. But in those same travel brochures were pictures of the outsides of the hotels. So that gets us away from the connotations of loneliness and art history and it becomes more objective. I’m not really interested in telling anyone about me, or my life. Then I started using pictures I had taken of landmarks, and I realized that they were more meaningless. A picture of the Chrysler Building doesn’t really have any connotations other then your own anecdotal ones. It doesn’t take you anywhere, you just recognize it, and you stop there. I quite like that. So I did a series of buildings [from photographs] taken from the Empire State Building. But the limitation I put on myself was that I could only take pictures from the viewing deck, because the thought of being able to wander around the city and take pictures of anything brought me back to that daunting subjectivity

BG: What makes one drawing more successful than another?

EG: Sometimes a drawing will fail because there’s not enough clarity, or I don’t feel like the marks work. I did a book of failed drawings. I did 300 drawings, of which 100 failed, and I wanted to make a book of them because if you’re seeing my work for the first time it shows you how the process works and how the language is developed. I didn’t want to make a monograph of my work as if I’m established…to me, this is like an artist’s book rather than a catalog.

BG: But what makes one successful? When do you sit back and say, “This is good, I’ve done good work”?

EW: Well, I’m trying to find the perfect mark. For example, in some I’ve softened the mark with a Q-tip, and that worked for a few drawings. But the same technique failed when I was trying to draw these windows, so the drawing failed. You’ve got to have quality control, don’t you? You’ve got to believe that if someone only saw one of your things that you would be proud. But I realized that there isn’t a perfect language, there’s only the right language for the right picture. If I like it, it’s more like I was a conduit for the language to do its thing.