David Sylvester Interviews Mandy El-Sayegh byDavid Risley

David Sylvester interviews Mandy El-Sayegh

BY DAVID RISLEY

In the book Interviews with American Artists by David Sylvester, the critic and curator talked to abstract painters in the early 1960s, mainly asking them the same or very similar banal questions about painting or being a painter. I asked Mandy El-Sayegh to answer the same questions that David Sylvester asked those painters in the 60s. How do those questions travel and how do they work now? Are they still relevant or are they nonsense? Do they translate across time, place, art history, gender, race, context, etc.?

DAVID SYLVESTER: How clear an idea do you have of what the painting is going to be like before you start to paint? MES: I realised quite early on that I could not paint on a blank surface—whenever this would be attempted, it would fail miserably. All of what had influenced you in your conception of painting infects the picture plane, and it becomes an overly self-conscious act to stand by the easel. So most of my practice is spent figuring out the right methodology for me to not think or implement an idea—in this way, I don’t identify as a painter—as there’s a lack of composition (in my mind)— rather, my work is like a spread that fills a space, something gaseous, responding to an already existing stain in the ground.

This could be found stuff, printed forms, disrupting textures. I paint on the floor stepping onto the works as I go so cannot ‘see’ fully what I’ve done until it’s stretched and erected. Not fully seeing while doing helps me not think-paint. In this way, questions of methodology will always be relevant to me when apprehending another artist’s practice; it’s a democratic inquiry.

DS: So it’s only when you’ve been working on the picture for a certain amount of time that you begin to see what the picture is going to refer to. MES: Yes. It’s almost not my choice, but the logical movement, resistance from the original, marks, texture, tones in the ground.

DS: So the painting—the kind of painting you do—though abstract, is in some way a metaphor of an attitude to reality, of a feeling of reality? MES: I guess this applies to all artists working across all forms.

DS: Concerning your work as a whole, do you feel—as many severe abstract artists before you have done, such as Mondrian and Malevich—that the paintings have some meaning beyond their formal qualities? MES: Yes, for me internally, by projecting multiple layers outwardly beyond form. Painting is one form among others within the practice of experimenting with the plasticity and reinscriptive potential of the fragment or content, which is historically specific but can be treated as fluid.

DS:

MES:

You want the paintings to have a suggestion of possible instability? Yes.This precarious body in time.

DS: Who do you feel your main influences have been? Barnett Newman, Ken Noland? MES: This question is fun. I have so many artist influences that none really stand out: I’m influenced by abstract expressionist painters, the way a painting coffee table book is treated. I never saw myself as a painter, more a draughtsman, or play-surgeon. I’d pour over anatomy books as a kid, fascinated by differing depictions; you really become attuned to style, gesture, mannerism when studying the supposed universal that is anatomy. Painting is just one of many forms to explore—a wider notion of the part-towhole relation. Of all the art forms, I think filmmakers influence me the most: John Cassavetes, Altman, Cronenberg, Lynch. All have a distinctive flow, composite bodies in narrative, image, and superimposition—I laugh as I recognise that they are also all white men, in which case, does this undermine the above points of disidentification?

DS: What in particular did you feel you were trying to destroy? MES: Nothing, the exact opposite—in fact, a defaulting to a robust conservative form like painting means preservation to me. I can put things in there, it can serve as a record.

DS: What led you to such an extreme kind of form? MES: Extreme in what sense? It is its banality that attracts me. There’s a violence to its entitlement in the history books—I guess in that way, it’s extreme. Listen to a bunch of painters talk, they’re often very much resting on what’s given.

DS: What makes you feel that a painting is finished? When do you leave it alone? MES: For the Net-Grids and vitrines, it will be when I reach the edge like a child colouring inside the lines. If it is a Piece painting (a more figurative anatomical study painting), it’s a bit harder and difficult to articulate— this would be closer to my conception of painting and composition.

DS: But what about stopping it? I mean, when you decide that you’re going to leave a painting alone, can you in a way rationalise or explain what it is that satisfies you? MES: Not really, you just get the sense that if you add any more, you’d be subtracting from the whole. Sometimes it’s still not ‘done’ at that point and you put it away to ferment a bit.

DS: How do you want your pictures to be read? Are they to be read as referring to something outside themselves? Do you mind whether they are? Do you mind whether they are not? MES: I’d want them to be understood as multi-layered, as they are conceived in method. They will be read within their historical contingencies, with and without me, I can contribute to negotiating this reading but my surname and birthplace already do things.

DS: Are you conscious of particular paintings having particular feeling tones? Particular emotional content? That some might be, say, angry, cheerful, sad. MES: Yes, I’m conscious of the emotive frequency or ambiguity that the painting is emitting once it’s completed and stretched. Some paintings are devoid of feeling tones, but I guess apathy is a thing too. The voidness is equally as important to the other affective states—I have a body of works called White Grounds that are essentially the Net-Grids in the state before the painted lines.

DS: Is it important to you? MES: More so the perception of difference between something and neutral.

DS:

MES:

When you’ve finished the painting, do you attribute it to any verbalisable feeling? I mean that a particular painting is violent, that a painting is sexual, that a painting is serene, and so on? Yes.

DS: There always seems to be this constant of an opposition between this personal handling, the marks, the free marks, with which you proceed to deal with what you began with, and the impersonal conventional elements with which you begin. MES: The relationship of specificity (from gesture, borrowed gestures of family, historical artefacts, imprinting) to the dominant universal of the framing is a key concern of the practice, yes.

DS: What is the difference between seeing when you look around, to seeing when you look at a painting? MES: The frame judgment. The former is ever-shifting and in flux between subject/ object.

DS: Who are the Black Painters? MES: It’s not for me to say. We’d have to reassess the terms and definitions of the question.

DS: Is Goya a black painter? MES: From my perspective, in the sense of a painter dealing with ideas of radical negativity (of spirit, ontology, literal paint), yes. Is he Black, no.

(These questions were originally asked by David Sylvester to Franz Kline, Barnett Newmann, Philip Guston, Jasper Johns, Adolph Gotlieb, in a series of individual interviews in the early 1960s. They are collected, with other interviews, in Interviews with American Artists by David Sylvester (New Haven, CA: Yale University Press, 2001)

DAVID RISLEY: Do these questions travel well? MES: Some do, some don’t, and this is beyond identity politics. I do value the idea of painting being a thing in itself, what posits itself as a universal can have as many exclusions as inclusions, and this is a worthy problem and space to mould and return to.

The question of restructuring the question is interesting and important. It’s an artefact of its time that isn’t fully applicable to now. The things that are, are redemptive, I’d like to think, the things that aren’t still allow for movement and subversion. I like big, white male painting partly (partly) because I am not: I struggle with them even on a literal level, but they can be Trojan horses. Many women BIPOC painters may even find my take irksome and quite rightly not want to not let them come into the equation, but I do find it an important point we have not yet traversed—it’s just that it’s not the total sum of its parts. As Sohrab Mohebbi has formulated in a question beautifully: “Who has the right to abstraction?” I do remember growing up here in the UK being continually asked what I am. The question is perplexing today as it ever was. This is still something, a presence to be negotiated—there are no laissez-faire painters. It cannot be afforded today. ◻