Marcus Jansen: Examine & Report

- And I said, "What does painting mean to you?"

And he said, "Painting is the most intimate act of war."

- Many of my friends were in the military.

I had joined from Holland and was sent,

almost immediately, to basic training in March

to report to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri,

and then immediately was sent to Iraq,

Saudi Arabia after that.

So I had very little time to sort of adjust.

I was there, from there I went to Fort Bragg,

and with Fort Bragg we went directly,

were sent directly over directly

'cause the conflict had already started.

- I think, of course, his military past,

you very often see in almost all of his paintings,

especially in the urban paintings,

but also in the Faceless Series.

He's a very serious person.

As I said, a very caring person.

He is very interested

in today's

political, economic, environmental subjects

and that, in my opinion, you see in all his works.

I saw the damage that we did.

Those are things that you don't forget

and I'm sure,

well, I'm not sure, but I don't know

how much my military experience

or what I experienced there, or even afterwards,

influenced my work now, but I'm certain

that it had some kind of impact on me.

There was a sense of hyper-alertness

that happened during that time.

When you're in an environment that's dangerous,

there's an automatic hyper-alertness

that you're in instinctive mode,

much more than a rational mode.

- One of my favorite things that I've seen,

it's not the, it's very naive,

it's not the best graffiti I've ever seen,

but I love the message

and it's a girl called Shamsia Hassanni,

she's an Afghan girl, she's 25 years old, lives in Kabul.

She's a lecturer at the university

which shows how fucked up it is

when you have a 25 year old lecturer

'cause there's no one else left.

But she's gone out and she's painting,

it's a girl in a blue burka that she paints.

And she paints it all over Kabul.

And you look at it and you go

that is one of the most politically charged images

that you could possibly have.

It means one thing in the west,

means another thing in the east.

She's going out, she's puttin' this thing out.

She's putting her life on the line

every time she does it.

- I was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder

when I came back, and

that probably had an impact too

in terms of the direction I took

and also being critical about what was going on.

- Those kind of things, that's what gets me excited

when people are trying to use the medium to say something.

Like I said, I don't mind people

doing purely decorative stuff,

but I do like the stuff that has a message in it

and I think, you know,

the general public also like it.

Again, to use Banksy as an example,

his is a very naive political message.

As his girlfriend used to say,

it's like sick foreign politics.

But it was something that resonated right away,

across the board; people liked the message.

Same with JR, same with Marcus.

If you look around, you'll probably find a handful,

they're actually trying to say something

on a political level.

I think, again, I think a lot of the artists

are put off by their galleries

for doing something that has too much of an edge to it

'cause it's slightly harder to sell.

- Everything in life somehow plays a part

in terms of decisions you make later.

I think all of it sort of came together in the arts

because it allowed me to explore that

and it gave me maybe some of the,

some of the motive on why I was doing what I was doing.

And I think that's probably one of the things

that brought my sort of awareness about being

or using your instincts for your benefit,

which again, like I said before,

we don't really use as much in a civilized society

because we're constantly following orders and rules.

So maybe it's that that sort of ignited that whole idea.

And obviously some of it worked its way into my work

in terms of looking at that information

and that experience as critical.

- And I suppose that's the other thing

that separates Marcus, in a sense,

from the previous generations of abstract expressionists,

because painting is something which really hangs on

in American art production

because of New York and because of the way

that New York took over from Paris,

and the influence of it

in a way I don't think it really hangs on in other cultures.

And I think that my first impressions of his work were,

they were unweighted, in a sense,

and I say that there was a lot of iconography,

a lot of popular iconography involved in it;

the Dorothy characters,

but also there's McDonald characters, things like that,

the prevalence of a certain grammar of symbols

which exist in the work, these targets which reappear,

the use of found material

which become symbolic material to a certain degree.

And I think that the emphasis for the gallery owner

was a sense on the more saleable pieces

which would be the wall-based works.

So paintings are much easier to sell than installations.

- That's the pleasure we have of looking at art,

is that it's the one free aspect that we have

that's not touchable.

- In some ways, seeing like the way he works in the studio,

it's a lot of shop talk kind of stuff how things are

and

I picked up that he's somebody that's been in the trenches

doing what he does,

and it's kind of nice because

there's murals on the trench walls,

he's

honing in

and he's focusing on

the nature of the materials

and the way that they're speaking to him.

I'm much more interested

in what I feel about a subject than

what I see in a subject.

It's the feeling that I get that interests me.

That's what we want to convey.

Instinctive feeling.

- And he's working on mastering the way they speak to him.

- You never know when you're done.

You just stop in a moment of time, you know.

Any painting can continue, it's just a matter of,

a painting is simply capturing a moment in time.

You can always continue a painting

'cause you can always go over it or, you know,

find a way to sort of continue it.

It's a matter of capturing one moment of many moments

that you already experienced in the process of painting,

in the process of putting it together.

- This knowing other painters, how they deal with the chaos

and the confusion and then finding

the answers in the confusion, I like that he works,

he talks about, "I don't know, I just get into it

"and then it kind of comes into being,"

rather than controlling it to be exactly

and which is like a Rauschenbergian thing.

Bob would say, "If I know what it looks like, why do it?"

- The work of his that I was really fascinated with,

the first work I was fascinated with,

was something called Rock-a-bye Baby

and it's a floor-based work, basically.

It could be hung on a wall, if you had a lot of anchors.

But it's a floor-based work which has a small

figure of a black baby in the middle of it

with no painted on its forehead

and a landscape around it which

is basically with found studio material, and then things

like jigsaw puzzle pieces, a lot of brushes, other things.

And discussing this with Marcus

I thought was very interesting

because there is a very fascinating discourse in,

you consider art history or art theory

that was mainly pioneered by WJT Mitchell,

who's a critic out of Chicago, and it's basically talking

about colonial ideas of landscape

and how landscape, as a genre,

can also be considered a medium,

in other words, it's a medium to convey power

or a medium to communicate power.

And usually you're thinking of Gainsborough

when you think of this,

you're thinking of these English landscapes

from base of the 18th century,

where you start having an empire,

in which you have the landowner

and maybe the landowner's wife

with this perfect, idyllic setting,

which they, in a sense, are the purveyors of.

They're evidencing their wealth.

And you can go on to people who did landscapes of India

for an entire career, but they spent one day in India

and India looks a lot like Dorset

for the rest of their career,

but it's supposed to be India.