BARNABY FURNAS

 

Barnaby Furnas
Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC
Sept. 16 - Oct. 21, 2006


Adam E. Mendelsohn: Is their any particular reason for using goatskin and stillborn calfskin as a surface to paint on?

Barnaby Furnas: As a general rule in my work I look for materials or processes that mimic what they are depicting as close as possible. For example I use hypodermic needles filled with red paint to mimic spurting blood, the hypodermics depict spurting blood in a far more realistic way then any combination of brushstrokes. With the skin my thinking is that rather then having to render skin ("paint was made to paint flesh") why not use flesh itself to depict flesh. Plus skin is the substance that separates air from blood, the goal is to find a sort of material realism rather then a painted one.

AM: Animal skins have been used as surfaces for paintings historically countless times for several different reasons. Specifically, African and native American Indian art uses animal skins a lot as painting surfaces. Also, tempera and gold leaf on parchment illuminations by Pacino di Bonaguida (1302-1340) for example. Is it more because it's simply a nice surface to work on, and that it can be charred and remain intact more so than linen and cotton?


BF: In a way I am hoping to recapture some of the spirituality of its historical use, the dead sea scrolls are on vellum, its an older surface than linen or paper or papyrus. In the end its that its dead and was once alive. They have to cut around nipples to get it off, it was protecting creatures that ran around, it has maximum facture.

AM: Are the two suns in the big images a way of dividing the picture in half down the middle, like a mirror image thing?

BF: Yes! That was one way I was thinking of it. My other thought was that they represent the full attention of god, I think both ideas are
interrelated.

AM: Who's John Brown? Is that a noose around his neck in one of the paintings?

BF: John Brown was a radical abolitionist who waged a terror campaign on Southern slave owners. His plan was to engage the slave owners and arm the slaves going plantation to plantation. He was a very religious man, a calvinist, and he believed god told him to do it, a religious quest. After a few bloody successes he raided an armory in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia and was trapped by local troops. General Lee was called in to capture him and succeeded. They beat him, gave him an opportunity to state his case, which he did very powerfully, and then hung him. Many people believe that he was the spark that began the civil war, as he galvanized the abolitionist movement in the North East. He was befriended and admired by intellectuals in the North such as Emmerson and Thoreau.

AM: How does Greedy Piggy and Effigy play in to the show as a whole?

BF: Those are effigies of collectors that have profited off me at auction. I am not sure how they relate as I did not conceive of the show as a whole. What I think ties the work together is the material and procedural vocabulary. In a way this goes back to your first question about the skin, the effigies are a way of making art that is real or real to me. They are attempts at a sort of vodoo or spell or curse, all of which can be thought of as ways to merge art and life - "the dark arts" etc. They were inspired by spells made by the playwright Arteaud as well as Jasper Johns or Rauchenberg's erasure of that deKooning drawing. I am quite sure these effigies have no effect on the victim but they do have a cathartic effect for me by giving me a voice in a transaction I have no control of, namely the secondary market, auction houses etc. "You can make all this money off of something I brought into the world, a piece of me really...I can make these and exhibit them and maybe auction them."

AM: Are Bad Back (Day) and Bad Back (Night) depictions of Christ?

BF: No, but I see them as being related. They are tortured and decapitated backs, inspired by the news. They are made on goat skin vellums in which the spine of the goat has been imprinted in the skin (most readable on the daylight painting).

AM: What's Heart Fucker about?

BF: An effigy. I began to think of the collector artist relationship as like a love affair. They are literally buying pieces of me. Thus when the collector sells, it's like being dumped so to speak. So these effigies are like reverse love letters, curses. Heart Fucker, which I prefer to be spelled with the symbol heart, is a strong way of saying:  ³you broke my heart, you let me down, you don't like me any more.²

 

All images courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC

For more info visit  www.marianneboeskygallery.com

 

Adam E. Mendelsohn is a full-time, free-lance critic and has written for: Time Out NY, frieze, Art Monthly, Art Review, Contemporary Magazine, Art Forum, Spike (Austrian), Whitewall, The London Magazine, Swingset, NYArts, and various other publications