An Interview with Karl Haendel (I)

By Vagner M. Whitehead

Los Angeles-based artist Karl Haendel works with large-scale graphite drawings that are shown in a variety of configurations in and around the gallery walls. The themes of his works, largely appropriated, include political commentary, personal narrative, and Modernist forms. Karl Haendel is represented by the Anna Helwing Gallery in Los Angeles and Harris Lieberman in New York City.

This interview was conducted via email exchanges.

Do you believe that works of art reflect the times they are created? If so, what is the reason/relevance for making large-scale drawings today? If you do not believe in the first question, why have you chosen drawing as your main medium?

I think the best works of art often reflect, or more accurately are a product of, the times in which they are created. I think many people would agree with me here, and it is has nothing to do with a specific medium. Sure artists have more mediums to work in today, but I think it would be nonsense to say that the best works today should be video or digitally based because we are in a digital age, which seems to me to be the assumption your question makes. Richter and Tuymans continually make some of the best works of art of our or any time, and they do so with a long-standing medium. Cory Arcangel makes digital work about digitalization, but it’s not the best work of our time. Paul Chan uses the computer to a much greater effect and relevance, but he also has a very serious drawing practice.

Karl Haendel, $56,055, 2005, Pencil on papel, 93 x 130 cm.
Courtesy of the artist.

As for why I draw, it seems a lot a people end up doing the thing they do best, and while I can’t dance or sing, I can draw. That stated, although I make drawings, I wouldn’t say that I have to make drawings, that it some sort of psychological need, or that I define myself by the medium. Making drawings has always been a choice, a way for me to have a definite hands-on studio practice, one that produces objects that can more or less easily circulate in the market, as well as to continue with theoretical investigations and remain within a conceptual lineage.

My question was not an allusion to time or digitally based media, but more towards the notion that the indexical presence, the hand of the artist, a “back-to-basics” is returning as a trend in the arts

There is no question that the handmade is certainly back and is a strong presence. But what’s interesting is that these categories, of what is skilled, or what is deskilled, of what is found, or what is constructed, are getting very complicated. There is something you see in sculpture in the US quite a bit now, the handmade readymade, or the object that looks found but is actually an extremely well made copy, often in “arty” materials, like bronze, plaster or wood. Sort of the school of Charlie Ray. Right now we are also in one of those periods where painting makes a reemergence, which seems to happen every few years, primarily when the market is strong. So yes, the hand is back, but its nothing new, these trends are cyclical and have some relation to the market. But I think each time trends come back around they have specific characterizes that make them a product of their time.

Your work is displayed in an unconventional manner, similar to salon-style, but with its own logic. Could you explain how you arrived at this strategy, and how you go about making these arrangements? Is there a system to it?

The way I install my work comes out of an appreciation I have for minimalist and post-minimalist practices. I’m drawn, like many artists, to work that understands and foregrounds the inherent material properties of the medium. Some of the Arte Povera artists, or Robert Morris, often let the materials they used determine the way work was shown. If a material was heavy, the viewer was made to understand this without having to try to pick the work up. These artists also began to consider the walls, floors and doors of the exhibition spaces as part of the work. I try to continue this tradition, and I’ve always felt that walking into a museum where a series of paintings are lined up on the wall at eye level and evenly spaced is fairly boring. The human body is not static, we move, our heads tilt and swivel, or eyes dart around. Why not use this to my advantage? That’s why I tend to use the floor, and hang work high, play off the corners, etc. It’s to try to provide for a totalizing viewing experience, one that makes you aware of your physical scale in relation to the work. So that when you walk into a Haendel exhibition, you are hit full on, before you move in closer to parse the show. And materials are very important, walls and partitions often are specially built, sometimes with the supports showing. Drawings are pinned, taped, or leaned; sometimes even the backs of the frames have information. I certainly owe a lot to Cady Noland in this respect. And if you pay attention to the construction of the frames, I use a lot of MDF, cardboard, and sometimes even welded steel. Since I try to be true to my materials, the many things that can go “wrong” with paper are usually just accepted, particularly staple holes and tears. At my first gallery show I didn’t have the money to frame the work and someone spilled red wine on one of the drawings. So instead of sending it to a conservator, I just initialed it “ok by KH”. Material honesty is critical to me, as is honesty in general.

As to the arrangement on the walls, there is no set system. Every time I install the works, it comes out differently. I often tend to shy away from absolutes (you can totally see it in the way I talk or write), preferring the partial or the relative. Relative relationships are of the utmost importance, at least while they last. I like to think that the way I install provides a kind of pacing for the viewer, allowing repetition and differences to come forward, providing gaps, bits of silence between noise. The negative space is significant, as I like to think it all happens in the space between works.

Is there a conscious goal in creating a style that is associated to your name (as in a “Haendel” exhibition)?

I think there probably is. When I first got to graduate school, I resisted a singular style. I was interested then in some of the relational aesthetics artists, and following what might be called project-based work. This was what I was looking at when I was at the Whitney program. For project-based work, you have to come up with ideas that are specific to exhibitions and locals. You have to be canny and clever repeatedly, and constantly have to propose these ideas before you carry them out, and much of the work is in your head and on paper. There was something about that that left me cold. And then when I got a studio and finally had many hours alone to work, I sort of realized that I really like studio based work. It was more attuned to my personality, where I like having a daily job of sorts, where I know that everyday I will have something to do, something to carry out. I wasn’t making work for a show or a proposal, I was just working. And at the end of the day it is clear that work was done, that you had something physical to show for it. I realized that I needed that for my mental well-being. The title of my recent show in New York, “I need work”, sort of alludes to that.

As well, I started to think more about some artists that I had previously overlooked, artists who had very recognizable styles. The Bechers, Baldessari, Gilbert and George. When you come across a Gilbert and George work in a museum it’s instantly recognizable and it’s like seeing an old friend, one whom you’ve know forever and you are always happy to see. A strong style seen in this light is positive and even endearing. Stylization is not good, but a unique style I began to think was all right. So I stopped fighting it and let my style come out. And its not that easy, really, to have a style this is distinctive and personal without being constricting. A framework has to be set up to provide enough variability to provide a lifetime of content while still staying true to a core system of aesthetic and formal beliefs.

There are different thematics or veins in your work - some are straight appropriations from mass media, some of personal experiences and relationships, some of objects found in your studio. How do you negotiate all these categories on your daily work production? Is there a pattern or rhythm it follows? How do you decide what is worthy subject and what is not?

Ideally I’d like to expand the “themes” in my work so that I could draw anything and it would be a Haendel. I don’t say that with hubris, its not like that, and I don’t mean it in a Warholian sense either. I wouldn’t draw just anything, I only pick very specific subject matter, its more that such a position would give me the possibility to picture anything, that there is nothing off limits, nothing safe from inquiry. It is that possibility that I am looking for.
I don’t really like to say what is a “worthy” subject; it suggests that there is some sort of subject classification system out there that ranks suitable material, or that if I choose a subject I can ordain “worthiness”. I usually just choose subjects that feel right, and I try to keep things honest, and avoid being too clever. I think I have an innate sense of appropriation, of what subjects will work. When I was an undergraduate in the 1990’s, my art history class only went up to the 1980’s, and the most recent art that we looked as were people like Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger, artists who were using appropriation critically. At the same time I was learning about these artists I was making my first attempts at studio work, and I started working for Haim Steinbach shortly after that, so all these appropriationist influences probably got mixed up into my practice. But I think for me and for some of the artists of my generation, I’m thinking of people like Nate Lowman or Seth Price, appropriation was so ingrained in us that it became a methodological tool, a very natural way to work. So that the way others paint, shoot video, or take pictures, we appropriate. Its sort of a way of going through life, of seeing the world, where I am always aware of things that would translate well as art. You also have to remember that much of my source material isn’t easily obtained or recognized, which separates me from the Pictures generation. I come at as more of a collector, a fan of obscurity and the obsolete.

Partially Erased Achille Lauro, 2006, Pencil on paper, 76 x 102 cm.
Courtesy of the artist.

Could you talk about why some images in your work are repeated in different configurations (scale, tone reversal, orientation, etc)?

There are a few reasons, mostly practical. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get the work right. I’m pretty good about sensing what will work, but every now and then we have to toss an early version. More often I sense that it will get better with a few tries. Other times I realize that a certain image has the potential to work in other configurations, that is, the image lends itself to a tonal inversion, or a reversed composition. The reversals or inversions come up more when I am assembling the groups or doing an installation, where conceptually I need a specific image on the wall, but formally it doesn’t work, so I make another version, perhaps flipped or in a different size. You could conceptualize the repetitions in my work as a thematization of iterability. Perhaps there is some truth to that, at least in how I’m drawn to the open-endedness that repetition allows, but really it comes more out of the physical needs of a studio practice. Things get a little more complicated because every now and then I turn a drawing back into a photograph, that is, I make a 1:1 scale C-print, with the tonalities inverted, of a finished drawing. I do this to bring the image back home, to return it to a photograph. It also somewhat inane, a quality I rather like in art.

You have a background in photography, and you also have done some performance. How are these other expressions present in your current work? Is your work bound to your strategy or do you see the possibility of medium changes in the future?

My work is intimately and inextricably bound up with photography, in the sense that I deal with found images. And when I say “found” images, I don’t mean in it in the strict appropriationist sense, I mean it more in the way a photographer might come across an image he would like to capture while walking down the street, or for a different photographer, he might set something up to capture. All artists create images, but they do so in different ways. A painter or drawer usually creates them with the medium he is known for, and in that way a painting is often a temporal record, a history of the creation of an image. Someone like Jason Rhodes or Rirkrit Tiravanija might create a series of images in the viewers mind as they interact with a complex physical or social environment. Photographers and video makers often do their image creation before the lens, before it hits the film or sensors. It’s choreography or editing that takes place first, and I think my work shares that quality with photography. But with my work there is often a double temporal relationship between the image and the referent. First I select an image and put it in front of the camera (this happens if I take the image myself or re-photograph another’s image) and then I rebuild the image with pencil, much like a painter. I’m trying to complicate the way we think of indexical relationships, but perhaps I’m trying to have my cake and eat it to. But I imagine drawing will remain central to my production, even if more things get added, or if I begin to reincorporate film or photography, which as I suggested has always been latent.

As to performance, I think it’s a different relationship. That’s because I now realize that for the few performances I did, while qualifying as performance in that I was up there in front of an audience “doing” something, I was really just explaining the relationships between static images, often drawings or photographs. My performances were actually just really weird convoluted gallery talks, sometimes stressing poetic or metaphoric relationships, other times acting more as farce. In either case, I realized that the works could, and should, be able to make these arguments for themselves. This naturally leads back to your question about how I install my drawings, which I hope retains some aspects of those earlier performances in their particularity.

Vagner M. Whitehead is an artist, educator and curator based in Detroit. His works can be seen at www.vagnerwhitehead.com.