Safety Propagandist #3: Alastair MacKinven

Adam Lehrer Corresponds With Our Third Safety Propagandist, the contemporary artist and painter Alastair MacKinven

The London-based artist Alastair MacKinven makes paintings that truly embody something reminiscent of a hallucinatory state, albeit not in a reductive, corny, “Oh they’re so trippy, man” kind of way. On the contrary, these are paintings that the eye truly gets lost in. Paintings that subsume the subjectivity in ambiguous bliss. They present themselves as replete of narrative potentialities and reverberative emotional resonances, and yet they defy digestible meaning. The paintings exploit the medium’s ability to offer possibilities without any promise of catharsis. It’s the painting as a limbo, in between reality and fantasy. Though he claims (below) to not think much about color, MacKinven’s palette approaches the sublime. Quite simply, I’ve never seen anything quite like it; deeply rich and saturated blends of reds, greens, blues and otherwise. The disorienting blend of colors is a result of the painter’s specific technique of grounding his canvases in a fine iron powder that is oxidized with weak acids. He explains this technique in detail below, so I’ll let you read through to learn more.

I’ll add briefly that MacKinven is also a musician who has played with one of my favorite rock n’ roll bands, The Country Teasers. The Teasers were led by Ben Wallers, a Scottish songwriter known for provocative, scathing, satirical and brilliant lyrics. There’s some discussion of the band below.

MacKinven’s exhibition [Dlnrg] [oeeey] will be open to the public until April 4 at Reena Spaulings, so if you’re in New York you best do yourself a favor and get over there ASAP. MacKinven and I had a correspondence over email and I was blown away by the complexity of his responses, and I think this might be one of the more comprehensive interviews about the artist’s work so far (he also challenged me in interesting ways, demonstrating the limitations of “researching an artist’s work” in preparation for an interview, which makes for some interesting and funny reading).

Adam Lehrer: Let's start with this phrase that you've described your work with, way back in 2009. "Abstract Capitalist Realism." Clearly, this is a reference to Mark Fisher's seminal text. "Capitalist realism" is essentially the pervasive sense that we can't do better than this. That capitalism, with all its contradictions, is the only viable economic system. And around that notion, there has been a total flattening of possibilities and limitations imposed on imagination culturally. So, what do you mean that your work is imbued with this "abstract capitalist realism," and by consciously addressing this phenomenon are you in a sense trying to prevent yourself from falling victim to a capitalist realist tendency? Also, does this label still apply, given that your work is much less abstract than it used to be?

Alastair MacKinven: Okay, let’s start… it is obvious you have done a web-based search of my name, finding all that has been written about my work. We are going to hit some immediate problems; don’t trust those little things called eyes and what they read on the web. I have never described my work as “Abstract Capitalist Realism,” instead, it was a title of an exhibition of a series of paintings I made in 2008 and were exhibited in 2009. Titling and describing are different, titling is like lenses in glasses, you look through them to see the subject of your gaze and as a lens is being looked through inevitably it becomes part of what you see whereas describing is the proposing discursive nodes that you employ your work to signpost.

The term “Capitalist Realism” before being a book by Mark Fisher (I haven’t read it, it was published in 2009, I exhibited these paintings in 2009, I had started painting them in 2008) was a term coined by a group of West German artist in 1963 who were working in Berlin, such as Richter, Polke and Konrad Lueg as a European response to the American pop art utilizing mass media and the banal; as well it could be seen as a counterpoint to the Socialist Realism of the Eastern Block, I see their coining and usage of the term to contain wit and cynicism. The term was being used long before Mr. Fisher used it and it is clear to me he is referencing the phrase utilized by the West German pop artists.

Here is the situation surrounding those paintings and my thinking about the title Abstract Capitalist Realism. The gallery I was working with at that time were not paying their artists; money was being channelled away from the artists. By this point I wanted to leave the gallery but they owed me money and I knew if I left I would never get paid. This show was trying to get out clean, give them work, watch them like a hawk, get the money that I was owed but also flex like the person who hates their job and finds pleasure in stealing post-it notes and HB pencils; a petty jouissance.

Those paintings were trying to flatten the relationship of paintings as commodities that pay for the basic utilities of the artist and situate the gallery at the center of this equation. It was a long walk to shame the gallery to pay me what I was owed; it failed. The paintings were silk screens prints and oil on canvas, the images were made from the data protection patterns inside my bills; bricks in the bank statement, flames from the gas supplier, zigzags for water. My cost of living boiled down to the five patterns denoting out going money, cynically it could be suggested the out going money that made me paint and enter them into the gallery structure. It is a petty jab at the gallery I was working with. I was trying to make a circular logic. Treating the phrase, Abstract Capitalist Realism,” like a portmanteau, the data protection patterns are abstract, art and sales being capitalism, realism is the slap in the face caused by opening a bill, and capitalist realism being the pop motif of the data protection patterns. 

I don’t think or work like this any more, it is an embarrassment, and you drag me back here! Why? I feel like a puppy that is dragged back to a poop it left on the carpet. 

AL: I've overused hauntology as a theoretical frame in the past, but you have referred to "industrial ghosts" or specters in your paintings before, in a way that Fisher and Reynolds saw that the great Mark E. Smith once did. Appropriately, your painting makes use of blurring, and spectral figures. Are you consciously addressing the "ghosts of modernism," or trying to evoke a sense of mourning?

AM: Sorry I feel a bit of a drag here in having to clarify something before I respond properly. I believe an artist who is worth their salt will not want to do things like the press release, if they do enjoy this side of things be wary of them as they maybe a bureaucrat. The thugishness of writing when it is laid prostrate on the page forgoes where its real power and nuance lays, this is recognized by Fisher and Reynolds in their reverence of Mark E Smith, remember MES had a microphone and a 50,000 watt PA system and an auditory articulation that burrows into your skull making it impossible to see his written words without hearing his pronunciation, this cross referencing opens up the nuance of understanding when seeing his written word. William S Burroughs also understood the neurolinguistic programing possibility of a good reading. Words have a character, they can feel good rolling off the tongue, they can hit like a wet wad of newspaper splatting against a wall, in short meaning they can be incidental. I say this to the picking out of ‘industrial ghosts’ from a press release, these things take root and feel like Japanese knot weed wrapping around my ankles heading towards my knees; on average I take a year and a half to bring a group of paintings to conclusion before exhibiting them, in contrast the press release request falls into my inbox ten days before the opening and I will grudgingly spend an afternoon at my laptop. 

For generosities sake, the phrase ‘industrial ghosts’ was a joke, turning the pathetic conditions of my studio into a poetic phrase for the digestion of people who want the romance. My old studio was in an old Victorian factory building, the rent was high and when it rained the water would come pouring into my studio, a true abject Victorian situation staring myself as the waif like painter and the fat old landlord who would sleep all day in a big armchair while the building rotted around us. I could have easily used the term, “Slowly we rot,” but I don’t think Mark Fisher is an Obituary fan?

Painting suffers in the same way that writing does; the A4 printout being a prison warden suppressing possible values within language as that little fucker the camera treats painting like its stepchild. Reducing it to image, reducing the painting to a picture and ‘picturing’ implies an affirmative making process. Meaning the artist sits down and makes notes on what they are going to paint, how it is intended to be received by the audience, coded with intention to be decoded, followed by the providing supplementary information that will state the thought process so no one will miss the artists clever critical jabs. The making of the work is akin to the assembly of a flat pack piece of furniture made to the instruction pre-written in all the preliminary study. Possibly why one is led to believe the press release has any importance. I don’t work like this, I see this as bureaucracy. I paint by use of a negative construction meaning… I begin, this is not like a starting pistol being fired, beginning is involuntary, it has occurred before you know you have started and what is found on the canvas is moved away from. You say no to way the painting will be perceived; you must understand the destructive painting process of scrapping off, painting over, rubbing out with turps is generative painting, it isn’t mechanical erasure, you can never have a true extraction and this is specific to painting and therefore must be treated as importance. In all other medium removal is total and true, the cropping of a photograph, the removal of a scene in a film, the chiseling away at a block of marble. Yet with painting you have pentimenti, Latin for repentance. As you suggest with Derrida’s term “hauntology,” a ghost of the negated occurrence on the canvas is evidenced as pentimenti. This earlier life that I have tried to exorcise through scraping off or painting over remains as a ghost of that which has been refused, yet at the same time this ghost opens a door to a new possible future that I can follow. Painting is a deep space, it goes back to the “subjectile” and passes through a negative construction of refusal of possible occurrences because they land in a normative way of understanding, I am guided by utilizing an objectivity that requires one to think through the brain of the viewer, this is easy to do. The ‘no’ of the negative construction is visionary as it leads to that which never could have been orchestrated in an affirmative process. The painting concludes itself when I have no way of recognizing it, sometime the canvas will have been painted on for seven years, I could not press control Z that many times to deconstruct the process. It is a collaboration between me and the painted surface, where “no” contains all the information I have in my reading of art, the art market, art history and my revulsion of the affirmative construction method that leads only to value exchange between viewer and audience, meaning the artist has a good idea, the artist codifies the good idea into an art work the audience member decodes art work and recognizes the good idea, the audience member says to the artist, you have had a good idea and are smart for having such an idea and coding it in such a clever way that I have recognized, the artist says you are smart for recognizing the good idea through your ability to decode. Good ideas are terrible for art, thus my embarrassment at explaining the Abstract Capitalist Realism work; I was a product of my Goldsmiths education in the mid ‘90’s where they dogmatically enforced this method as a neo-conceptualism.

This has been long winded but I hope you understand that the blurring is destructive painting as method, as a generative way forward while coving up all I could not allow the painting to be and the figures do not belong to me they are occurrences of a negative construction. I can agree somewhat about ghosts, they are trapped possibilities negated and evidenced as pentimenti, like how General Zod, Ursa and Non were trapped in the Phantom Zone in Superman 2. To be clear I am not interested in this film nor in sci-fi, this is a joke, if you could hear my timing you would be wetting yourself with laughter.

AL: Figurative painting has become all the rage again. Dean Kissick has detected a tendency within contemporary figurative painting that he calls "Zombie Figuration." Basically, it seems that the clever and transgressive figurative painting of people like Mathieu Malouf, Jana Euler, and Jamian Juliano-Villani has been widely popularized, and now every art student seems to just find “weirdish” images on Google and turn them into paintings. "Bad figurative painting is a renunciation of art’s radical avant-garde potential, but also of traditional ideas of sublime and transcendental beauty," writes Kissick. And you of course are working with the figure, but never is your work absent of the sublime, of beauty, or of a connection to the avant-garde. Do you ever feel a tendency to reduce your painting to the flat image, or is it a constant effort to connect to the beyond? To beauty?

AM: Fuck man! “Zombie Figuration” it the laziest thing I have heard in years! There is a misregistration in this shorthand that has not been properly addressed, in regards to Zombie Formalism, someone like David Ostrowski is a good painter; it is clear he crawled on his belly through the mud and spent time in the trenches. He is working with a legacy of deskilling and debasement that goes way back, and includes a lineage of painters such as Seurat and Cezanne, it is clear that he has spent time at the coalface to arrive where he did. Then along comes a writer who thinks like someone tidying their flat and believes they are putting like with like and mistakes painting as surface. If you go back to my last answer you will understand you should not believe in the image space of a painting, often with good painters this is a symptom of conditions, it is like a rash, hives or acne caused by an allergic reaction to the contemporary conditions such a those of the amateur taxonomist. Is not the radical potential the desire of the older person who asks, “why are these yougins’ not radical like it was back in the day?” Diedrich Diederichsen summed it up ten years ago in, Radicalism as Ego Ideal: Oedipus and Narcissus.

The problem is not within figuration or abstraction, it is within the ability to view all the work that is exhibited in real time and get a sense of how it is hitting in relation to the market, young artist can read this flow like one looks at the stock exchange ticker. Instead of attaching zombie to figuration or abstraction or conceptualism or land art, I see it more as a veneer art, the absorption of surface through looking at Contemporary Art Daily daily. You get a sense of how it looks, its surface, the veneer of contemporary art and this surface can be easily emulated. I don’t even see this as a problem as it is an affect of this age and therefore is a summation of the reality of now which one could see as a defining quality of art at this point in time. But the moralist demands an authentic something behind the veneer, and this can be found in the artist who crafted the zero point, like Ostrowski and Euler, who are both seminal. I do feel like there is a gun to the back of my head when someone states Zombie Figuration, as it is easy to think you are putting “like with like but,” I do not engage with such debates, I am not a figurative painter, I aspire to total fucking abstraction, yet to use an abstract or non-objective vernacular tethers your work to history, abstract work is territorialized through historical similarity, to the guy who dripped, the person who used masking tape, the person who smudged. Whereas to allow the occurrence of a figure enables the working away from the normative roles the figure has and the removal of the role the figure plays, which causes a destabilization opening up ruptures and abstraction. The flattening of painting is deadly to it, most misunderstand painting as they see it as surface which is only there to hold subject and the artist’s employment is to articulate their conceptual endpoint using painting as a tool, discrediting painting being the “thing-in-itself.” This is reinforced by the structures that surround art that does not want the viewer to feel ostracized by art, so it is made empirical to make the audience feel they take something away from the viewing experience, an enrichment. I will go further to state that it is the general public who control art as the museums serves them, the museum is not for the artist, it is designed around the interloper, and from my observations they hate art as they cannot let it reach its potential as radically unemployed. Myself, I want to stare, not to know and dribble down the front of my jumper. I have no interest in the explorations, investigations, interrogations, waterboarding of concepts by artist, it has been done, and it only leads to value exchanges. All of these things I reject, yet they provide me my compass to guide me away from these traps in the making of my work, it is essential to the understanding of painting to see it as a deep space formed by a visionary no. I imagine one could define this as transcendental, or attach words like beauty, I have no problem with this word it is a default word that is trying to express a felt response to something that is impossible to find the words to describe and if you could it would not be beautiful. Yes, I make beautiful paintings.

AL: I'm thinking again about the flattening of possibilities. We're both in the art world, more or less. It can be a suffocating place, ideologically you generally have to be very openly aligned with a kind of intersectional left liberalism, or you have to keep politics to yourself all together. Similarly, you've been a visual artist and a guitar player for the Country Teasers (and the Stallion) for equal lengths of time, which to me is a kind of opening up of possibilities because very few artists are able to produce art of that quality in two entirely different industries. But you do. Do you feel that an antagonism between collapsed imagination of the culture and your own idiosyncratic tendencies as an artist is formed, and maybe that's what makes your work so seductive to someone like, who has a natural revulsion towards all contemporary cultural institutions?

AM: It is interesting to think back on the Country Teasers and it is hard to express the mind space that guided the band. It was special because it had no aspiration, and not in a reactionary way to the aspirations the music industry promotes but it was in its entirety for the sake of itself. As a band it was a tree that fell in a forest with no one around to hear it but due to the Internet it has posthumously connected with an audience. Ben [Wallers], as a musician, holds tight to being a hobbyist, this is the reason why he works in a garden centre, separating income from music enables him a position that never encounters pressure to do anything outside of what he is doing, nor does it suggest he could be doing more or there is a goal outside of the doing. And this enabled the band to be what it was; we were like-minded people who never once thought of it as a vehicle for success. I cannot think of any other band who cared so little for its reception and counter intuitively it is loved because of these values which enabled us to record albums and tour the world. We were like hobos, I would leave on tour with a couple pound in my pocket and come back with the same but had some experiences along the way. I morn the death of Dole culture in the UK, it was the training ground of the arts it gave space and time to craft your vision, the Country Teasers were part of this legacy.

I was in the band due to being like-minded, therefore sharing the values or lack of values. In my art practice I had the wonderful experience of having a bad experience with a gallery that I mentioned earlier. This debacle made me totally disillusioned with the art world, I was disgusted that it was complicit with outright stealing from artists. At the point when my relationship with this gallery was collapsing it also coincided with personal problems resulting from serious health failure. I needed this money to take care of affairs while possible death loomed, yet these needs were flat out ignored all the while the industry of art was happy to work with these people who were crooks. Mentally I wanted nothing to do with the art world so I walked away, but I was an artist and walking away never included stopping painting. Like Ben, I separated income from art and started teaching. It is peculiar to the art world that stepping away did not mean quitting, and it was hard for it to understand that my friends, artists with success, saw me as, yes, an artist. I never felt lesser as an artist for not having representation, I felt powerful in saying “no” to offers of representation. This is when I started refiguring my work, breaking from my educational infection, refusing to provide supplementary qualifiers. This is the legacy of my paintings as they are now, the ones that some fuck wants to call “Zombie Figuration;” no no no I am proudly radically unemployed in my studio, dole life!

To use broad generalization is a mistake and the art world is made up of an assortment of people, many of them wonderful, bright, funny, and talented people it is a joy to work with such people and has had a positive effect. No one would have heard the Country Teasers if not for Tim Warren or Larry Hardy and likewise what makes Reena, Tramps and Maureen [Paley] so great is they trust themselves. So when I received an email from Reena saying, “Love the paintings, do you want to show them in NY?” It was obvious that it was a positive opportunity and the paintings are what they are because of having the confidence to step away and find out what I want to call my art and to make them in a contentment of their making, a very tight feedback loop. Paradoxically the art world likes and wants to pull in that which is happily contented in the sovereignty of the studio, contradictions within contradictions. As R. D. Laing wrote, “They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game.”

AL: It's curious to me that you don't seem to title your works that often, given that you have written poetry and worked in music, both of which are art forms resplendent of language. Is there a reason you make the decision to leave the title blank? Do you think visual art should be full of mystery?

AM: I took the decision to stop titling my work, titling use to be a gift of mine I was good at it. I am sure you can gather there was a shift in my thinking about art and stopping titling came with the shift. You can think of painting as having two possible directions, one is outwards the painting directly leads to intentions and discourse. The other direction is inwards where the engagement with the work causes the dropping away of cognitive attempts to terrestialize the work, instead the world falls away. 

Painting is difficult to discuss even to the professional critic and it is common that every piece of peripheral information that surrounds the exhibited paintings is foregrounded and uses as a stand-in for the discussion of the painting. The press release, the image on the exhibition announcement, and of course the title, I am trying to cut away indexical threads that lead to discursive engagement. I use a negative construction to open up possibilities, find ruptures, emergences, and this includes layer upon layer of propositions which are negated but open the door to new possible futures. For this to occur, I cut away spaces that may provide affirmative intention in the making of the painting. Therefore I have to repress my gift at titling; I don’t see it as mystifying, as that is an obfuscation of that which is known. 

AL: Bright washes of color; acidic greens and halos of reds and pinks; have been characteristic of your aesthetic for sometime now, and certainly this is the case with your new show at Reena Spaulings. But somehow these colors evoke doubt, uncertainty, and a kind of liquidity more than they evoke, whatever, the things we normally associate with bright saturated colors. Could you just talk about your color choice, what fascinates you about these colors, and if you think they are able to be complicated somehow?

AM: This will be seen as a copout but I don’t think about color, this will be due to having learnt about color. It is like learning your scales in music, when you have turned them molecular you can use them without thinking about them. I will try to reverse engineer my ideas around color. 

My use of color comes from the surface of my paintings; I ground the canvas with a fine iron powder that I oxidize with a weak acid. This covers the canvas with a thin metallic rusted surface, if you went to the gallery with a magnet it would stick to my painting due to the iron. The surface is porous, dry and textured, this enables me to sit paint in the very back of this covering and I can put paint on the very top of the texture meaning I can place color on top of color and keep them from mixing into a composite color. Therefore it is possible for me to exaggerate colors by putting close clashing colors on top of one another, like pinks and reds. The closeness of clashing colors, a microtonal usage causes a vibration, each color is intensified by this technique. As I never know what I am going to paint I am constantly covering or putting paint over paint and this process without it being my intention will lead to these washes. As I have been balking at the surface reading of painting I would add to it by saying there are multiple surfaces that exist within each painting; the representational, the subject surface, the texture surface, the color or phenomenological surface, also the mark surface, all of these and many more coexist in each painting. The mind of the viewer builds a composite of the many surfaces in their mind; it is impossible to see all of them together at the same time. When you zone in on image you are having to look past the surface distortions and when you see the textured surface you zone out of the image. When you experience the color you are not seeing the other surfaces. Using color as color and not as a sidekick to representation allows me to work independently on each surface knowing that it will cause a destabilization and help to knock that strutting peacock that is image/subject off its high horse yet still use it for purposes that are of my making. The doubt you mention could come from them being free floating, independent in use, emerging in the same was as image emerges, there is no reason for the color, therefore this could be seen as doubt or uncertainty again this is a perversion of normative use as I see with my use of the figure.

AL: Your work has evolved stylistically and conceptually quite a bit over the last decade. It used to be more abstract, used a different palette, even reminded me a bit of someone like Brion Gysin, who is one of my favorite artists of all time. But then you started taking on the figure more directly, even if in a complicated and spectral manner. What precipitated this evolution?

AM: I feel I have answered this question; but to repeat for repetitions sake… My paintings are more abstract now I have walked away from the thinking of my old work, as I was being the ‘good student’, I wanted to stop talking and dribble, I had no gallery so I made with optimism and focused my interest on what was occurring. The figures are perversions that occur from my methodology of the negative constructions; it is a de-narrativized symptom not of my making. Maybe you should ask Rupert Sheldrake from where they come, I don’t know.

AL: Does the shift also have anything to do with your disillusionment with conceptualism?

AM: There were two experiences that were informative to my evolution as an artist; the first being a studio visit from the friends of such and such museum. This was prior to my exhibition of the ACR* paintings, they were being made by the time of this studio visit and I found myself in the middle of providing contextual information about the paintings as well as talking about the performance work that I had been making. These performance works – such as breaking into Greenwich Park with a mirror on a stick to move the laser that marks GMT across the sky of London, super gluing my hand to a curator to give a lecture at a gallery, squatting a gallery by cutting a hole through the gallery wall – these works turn you into a raconteur and it is easy to seduce with such stories. At a certain point I became so bored of my voice, with talking, with providing the supplementary information to the engaged crowd; I felt like a service provider, disgusted with my clowning for the crowd, with providing proof I was an interesting artist, or whatever adjective you want to use. After they left I thought, “Fuck that! I am never doing that again.”

The other was a studio visit a few months later, my gallery brought around some people, and I can’t remember whom. In the time between the visits I had made a big painting that was just a hotdog and a hamburger, on the left side a giant hotdog and on the right a giant hamburger on a white background, I painted them as realistically as I could. This was all I had to show my gallery and their guests, when they arrived and saw this painting they looked confused this was exacerbated by me making no attempt to talk about it, I only shrugged my shoulders and said “hamburger and hotdog.” It was humiliating, such an embarrassing 20 minutes, so much so that after they left I cut the painting up. Then upon contemplation it occurred to me that I had made a group of long, in the tooth art professionals feel confused, dislocated, and that they had no idea how to approach me or the painting and I saw the space I had opened up as one of power, I had manufactured a rupture and it empowered me. It was like a door opening up; the rumination on these experiences has led to the work I make now. I did remake the painting of the hotdog and hamburger to remind me of that occasion, I still have it.

I wouldn’t say I am disillusioned with conceptualism, everything is in flux and conceptualism is learning as painting has, conceptualism is having to find new way of operating, meaning the form of conceptualism will have to be as considered as the subject or concept is, just as painting has to readdress it form constantly. I feel an artist like Jana Euler holds the torch of conceptualism and it is very well tended in her hands. I know it may be contradictory as I am going on a lot in this Q&A, but I have nothing to say, I do just want to stare and dribble.

AL: Forgive me if this is a bit convoluted, but I'll give it a try. So, on The Stallion's album Dark Side of the Wall, you and Ben [Wallers] covered Pink Floyd songs, and made them totally your own. Now, the tension in that record I thought was fantastic. On one end, you have Pink Floyd, which immediately denotes psychedelia, transcendence, and the cosmos, whatever. But then you have The Country Teasers, which grounds the work in industrial Britain, based materialism, etc.. Similarly, I think of something like William S Burroughs. McLuhan said that Burroughs needed junk to become one with his environment, and to transcend it. But the opposite was true, Burroughs' natural inclination was towards the mystic, towards magic. Junk was what he needed to bring him down to Earth, and to become an observer of reality. An observer of control systems. I feel like there is a similarly contradictory dynamic in your paintings. On one end, these figures feel like they're trying to expand outwards into the beyond, into that which cannot be seen. But they are also dragged back down to Earth, to the petty, to political economy. Is my reading at all accurate here?

AM: That question is interesting to think about, let me try and gather my thoughts. At the heart of the Stallion album is the folly and that could be expanded to include the Country Teasers who I earlier described as without aspiration and contented to make with in the satisfaction of the making, this could be a definition of the folly. In truth we are two middle age men who lack the social skills to hangout without a constructed reason. The Dark Side Of The Wall was on one level a social event, we would record every Monday, and we had a goal to re-record Pink Floyds the Wall from start to finish. The next layer would be to turn the songs into as much our vernacular as they were Pink Floyd’s so the album is complicated as it is not really a covers album and it is not really a Stallion album, I believe this was naturally going to happen as the Country Teasers are a singular as Pink Floyd. We are in a blessed situation that people will release our follies, and people will engage with it due to the increasing interest in the Country Teasers. This again I feel is born out of the band’s peculiarity and singularity and I believe at this point the project intersects with your question. As it may be seen that Pink Floyd were the cosmic explorers, they open up spaces of escape, headphones on, fire up the bong and leave the drudgery of the world behind. I love this about Pink Floyd and use Dark Side of the Moon as medicine, where as the Country Teasers sing the horrors of the world, using a shifting motor of satire to blunt honesty that cross and contradict, to put voice to the hell of the world and the hell of having a mind that is sinful. But ultimately the Country Teasers are cosmic with their propositions for the world it is voiced from a horrible depressing rainy street in London. We are similar to Pink Floyd, the specific Pink Floyd when Gilmore and Waters are able to write together but probably hate each other. We are nothing like the Syd Barrett-era Floyd.

AL: If painting is neither live or dead, is it best to think of it as being undead?

AM: This question is a classic twofer (two for one) with a side of curly fries if the undead were the curly fries. The zombie is the undead and zombie in front of a generalization is criticism, and all of these terms belong to the chorus. To proclaim the death of painting is to revive it in the next breath like Lazarus when some young hotshot comes along. It is called zombie when there is a creation around the hotshot that kills the hotshot as collateral damage to keep the wheels of capitalism rolling. I like to keep my head down, work in the studio long hours and try my hardest to paint objective bangers.

AL. You said something interesting about William Blake, who I love. You said your shift towards appreciating Blake was that he's indicative of this adolescent artist, who maybe has an idea of what art is but is still ignorant about those things. It feels like this is something we are rapidly losing in late neoliberalism, when everyone is marketizing themselves before they even get to school. Are we losing the transcendental quality of being an artist?

AM: I did an interview a while ago and I think they used a dictation app and had no copy editor so when I was sent the transcript it read like I was on speed. I made efforts to try and turn it into sentences but I couldn’t face reading what was published, ha ha. The above question is a bit of a mash up of a few thoughts. I do love William Blake, I use to hate him, I loathed his stylization, his floating figures, it all repulsed me. But I loved the work of the adolescent, they are made at a time when the young artist has a notion of art but it is a misunderstanding, their idea revolves around a belief in highly achieved representational drawing and painting; their focus is so engrossed in the achieving a level of representation that is beyond their skill so they make work which shows their intended destination and their failure to achieve it all wrapped in a misunderstanding of how art operates. I love edge of ability work; I love the tight feedback loop of making work that excludes the outside audience all the while being made under a misunderstanding of what art is. It is powerful; there is no position of critique available to the viewer as it is so hermetic.

Due to my love of work like this I have a reproduction of a teenagers drawing of William Blake’s Ancient Days and I would marvel at this drawing. Incidentally it caused me to think about Blake and one day it dawned on me as I was adrift trying to figure out how I wanted to paint after abandoning my post-Goldsmiths vernacular work. Through Blake I realized that he worked with myths, classic Greek mythology, Christian narratives, Milton and Shakespeare, then at a certain point he places his own mythology on top of these foundation stones that resonates as strong as the other yet is pure brutal invention by Blake. This blew my mind and Blake revealed his absolute genius to me. It affirmed Levi Strauss’s idea of the “Mytheme” and made me realize that I could walk away from have to tell, reference, signpost and allow the unknown to pass through me and it still could impact and create empathetic connection with a viewer without having to tell a story. I feel Blake’s tugging on the connective thread that binds us all without needing to read the words of know who is who in his stories. I know, you know, we feel it and in this field we are all bound.

As for the neoliberal marketizing of young artist killing the possibility of transcendence; I feel this is a result of the art institutions wanting to ground the viewer when confronted by a work of art by providing a translation. The translation is provided by the text, it provides biography, decoding of the subject, a network context of what artistic community the artist belongs to. As the institution is fighting for and promoting this method of engaging with art it makes sense that artists will work this way as exhibiting in the museum is an indicator of success as an artist. These are the games that are played by the artist when energy is applied to trying to control what happens to your work when it leaves the studio, it seeps back in and is corrosive to the motors that an artist will have had in developmental stages, such as wonderment, boredom, just wanting to see for themselves or “what if?” I personally prioritize work that goes inward and I understand this being recognized as transcendent. Museums are not for the artist, to think about the goal of a painting in its life outside the studio is deathly. I am sure these are lessons learned from working with Ben in the Country Teasers.

AL: Do you ever feel like the art world is the most oppressively conformist place to be on Earth? Almost like is perverted kind of conformist non-conformism? That it drops with contempt with anything that it disagrees with? This is a selfish question, but don't feel like you have to answer it.

AM: Is the world of vegetables the mega-super market; is it the allotment, could it be the old patch of scrubland that if you spent enough time on your hands and knees you dig up a potato? It is all about the vegetable and in my opinion the vegetable is good. 

AL: All right, I know these questions are annoying but the readers love them. You're throwing an after life dinner party and you can invite five artists, philosophers, filmmakers, musicians or otherwise? Who's getting the invite, and what do you all talk about?

AM: Ha-ha, the contempt in which you treat your readers is shocking! I will tackle this question in the spirit of a guest on a late night chat show.

I would invite Black Sabbath over, the classic line up: Ozzy, Bill, Geezer and Tony. I would invite Masayuki ‘Mochy’ Mochizuki, one of the greatest living backgammon players and Boudica. We would talk about Black Sabbath, Backgammon, the Roman Empire and hedgehogs. We would eat Belon oysters followed by suprêmes de pigeonneaux aux truffes and, for dessert, Rothschild soufflé with a 2014 Petrus, Pomerol. I would have Escoffier prepare the meal.

Many Thanks Adam.

Illustrations: all of the paintings are from MacKinven’s current show at Reena Spaulings and are Untitled.

The Safety Propagandist interviews are a series of Email correspondences between artist, writer and Safety Propaganda curator Adam Lehrer with artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, dissidents, crackpots, sorcerers, outsiders, weirdos and more. The courageous ones. The ones who won’t be silenced.