"...The painting is also an allegory of the senses.
I have sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound in there..."
"...My family was from the South and I’m descended
from slave-owners. I was interested in confronting that
aspect of my background and making pictures about it."
"I think that there’s almost no subject that you
can’t treat with some humor, no matter how brutal it
can seem."
"...My humor is a bit at the expense of the Empire.
And I feel like I can be the brunt of my own joke. And I
don’t see any reason not to do that, to poke fun at
my own culture, to poke fun at my own foibles."
"In the colonial experience as it happened in
India, it was almost as if India was caught in an abusive
relationship with some sort of male. That’s how it
always was portrayed. What England held was feminine and
what England was was masculine."
"The big, big thing I’m always looking for in
my work is a sort of attraction-repulsion thing, where the
stuff is beautiful to begin with until you notice that some
sort of horrible violence is about to happen or is in the
middle of happening."
"There's an innate suspicion that some people have
of craft, of being able to paint or caring or giving a damn.
Not forging ahead in that modernist tradition of breaking
new ground and using new media."
Can you talk about the series
of paintings you've been working on that deal with Sir Richard
Burton?
FORD:
I have this ongoing project
that has to do with this African explorer, Sir Richard Burton,
who I actually have pictures up on the wall in my studio.
He was one of these 19th Century explorer guys that I’m
particularly interested in. And he was a complete lunatic.
He was a linguist and knew something like thirty or forty
languages by the time he kicked. He translated the "Kama
Sutra" into English. He translated "The Perfume
Garden." He spoke Arabic and Hindustani. He spoke many
languages very well, to the point of being mistaken for a
native. He was stationed in India in the 1840's, during the
Raj, as an English officer. And he was able to penetrate Mecca
in disguise as some sort of Persian trader or something. And
he had all these aliases. He was a spy. He was part of the
great game—the whole kind of thing that Kipling talks about
in "Kim."
The painting I’m working on now is a monkey banquet.
It has something like nine or ten monkeys so far. I’m
going to put more in. And it’s part of a series that
has to do with Burton. He’s an endlessly fascinating
character for me to study. But one of the stories that I was
reading about him that stuck with me was this one about these
monkeys that he kept in his quarters when he was a young British
officer. And I’m going to read a quote that explains
the painting:
“His language studies continued unabated and his interest
in the science of the spoken word led him to conduct an interesting
experiment with some pet monkeys. Curious as to whether primates
used some form of speech to communicate, he gathered together
forty monkeys of various ages and species and installed them
in his house in an attempt to compile a vocabulary of monkey
language. He learned to imitate their sounds, repeating them
over and over. And he believed they understood some of them.
Each monkey had a name, Isabel, his wife, explained. He had
his doctor, his chaplain, his secretary, his aide-de-camp,
his agent, and one tiny one, very pretty, small and silky
looking monkey he used to call his wife and put pearls in
her ears. His great amusement was to keep a kind of refectory
for them where they all sat down on chairs at mealtimes and
the servants waited on them and each had its bowl and plate
with the food and drink proper for them. He sat at the head
of the table and the pretty little monkey sat by him in a
baby’s high chair.”—That’s just too
good!—“He had a list of about sixty words before
the experiment was concluded, but unfortunately the results
were lost in a fire in 1860 in which almost all his early
papers perished.”
And to me, this is just what I’m looking for when I’m
doing all this reading. I do a lot of research and this thing
has almost everything in it. It’s like a mini-history
of colonialism
right there, of the imperialist venture. He’s learning
all the languages he can. He’s possessing as much of
the culture as he can. There’s an erotic kind of fascination
to it, like he’s got his wife. The whole thing is so
wild. And yet there’s something sort of futile and hopeless
about it. And then the whole thing goes up in flames. I mean
it’s almost the history of the British in India. It’s
too good!
So the painting I’m working on now is Burton's refectory,
his amusement. And I’ve got the wife in the painting.
The doctor, the aide-de-camp, the chaplain—they’re
all in there. And I’ve assigned them all little personalities
of their own. And as I was working on it, a little subtext
crept in and I went with it—which is the painting is
also an allegory
of the senses. I have sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound
in there as well, mixed in with the things. It seemed like
the senses come to play in this sort of colonial experiment
too. You know he’s just trying to experience.... Burton
was one of the, great British minds and was endlessly curious.
He wasn’t one of these people that talked about “bloody
wogs.” It was more like he really wanted to understand
the cultures he was immersed in. Not in an enlightened or
politically correct way, but in a way to better serve his
country and his cause, to serve this sort of empire. But head
and shoulders he's more interesting than most of those guys.
They looked down their nose at him and called him “Dirty
Dick Burton.” They found him sort of filthy because he
was so interested in the erotic and was interested in researching
brothels and things like that. A little more than what made
his mates comfortable over there.
ART:21:
Is there something about colonialism
that's inherently humorous to you? I don't think most people
would find colonialism very funny.
FORD:
That’s a good question
because I feel like on some level I’m personally acquainted
with some of this material because my family was from the
South and I’m descended from slave-owners. I was interested
in confronting that aspect of my background and making pictures
about it. So for a while I did try to do that. This is a more
indirect way, you know, not directly making pictures about
my people so to speak. But I'm interested in finding a way
into this material.
I think that there’s almost no subject that you can’t
treat with some humor, no matter how brutal it can seem. And
that’s just something that I see in Goya or Brueghel
or people like that, or even R. Crumb, or somebody where the
subject matter is pretty intense. With Goya, he’s talking
about a Spanish inquisition, but to do it he’s got a
parrot or some sort of weird animal allegory
functioning that has to do with bulls falling from the sky
or something like this. Brueghel is the same way. Like if
he’s dealing with some dreadful sin or cruelty, there’s
room for a sort of droll approach in his mind anyway. And
when I was thinking about my ancestors there was something
kind of pathetic about them. Like one series of paintings
I did—and it’s not that I necessarily want to call
attention to earlier work, but it all leads to the approach
that I have now—was painting ancestors of mine on horseback
but losing control of their horses. And I know enough about
riding to know what you’re supposed to do. Not that I’m
a good rider, but I’ve ridden horses. So the idea being
that these guys were losing their stirrups and they’re
sort of slipping from the saddle. But the whole equestrian
tradition has to do with mastery of a spirited animal and
with control, and I wanted to subvert that.
So my humor is a bit at the expense of the Empire. And I feel
like I can be the brunt of my own joke. And I don’t see
any reason not to do that, to poke fun at my own culture,
to poke fun at my own foibles. And kind of feel like I’ve
earned that at the very least, you know. There is another
book, the "The Autobiography of Emily Donaldson Walton,"
and she is someone who remembers the plantation. I’ve
always had this book and this is what she wrote when she was
in her nineties. And this is in the 1930’s. So she’s
someone who remembers Sherman’s march on Atlanta. What’s
amazing about my family is that, for example, my brother who’s
six years older than me, there’s a picture of him sitting
on my great grandmother’s lap. Now my great grandmother
remembers when Sherman marched on Atlanta when she was about
six. My brother was twelve when the Beatles played at Shea
Stadium. So the overlap there is just insane, how compressed
the history is.
I’m very interested in addressing this stuff. I think
we had some very grim political art in the ’90s that
was photo or text based and absolutely humorless. And I don’t
think people benefit from that tone of voice. I think the
best antiwar film ever made is "Dr. Strangelove,"
period. And so much better than something like "Schindler's
List," which will just make you feel so sanctimonious
and it’s just—who needs it? That’s my take
on it.
ART:21:
What's particularly humorous
about British colonialism?
FORD:
The thing about this monkey
picture is Richard Burton is keeping forty monkeys in his
quarters when he’s a young officer to learn their language.
There’s something just right away that strikes me as
humorous in the quintessentially super-eccentric British way
and their mode of building an empire which was carried out
by these kinds of eccentrics.
There is just some sort of sad humor in this idea. When I
painted the monkey wife, I painted her individually and I
named it "The Forsaken." And my idea is that what
Richard Burton did as part of his colonial enterprise was
to actually learn languages. When he would go to a new place
he would have a woman set up house for him and become his
mistress. And he said he would learn the language that way.
So this thing with the monkey wife seemed to be perverse once
you know that about him. I set up a fantasy that she was devoted
to him, that she really loved him. And when he left she was
a bit heartbroken to no longer to be his wife. In the colonial
experience as it happened in India, it was almost as if India
was caught in an abusive relationship with some sort of male.
That’s how it always was portrayed. What England held
was feminine and what England was was masculine. Then when
they get out of the relationship, there’s some sort of
bereft quality to the place once you leave. So it mocks that
idea, as if this monkey could care less. So she sits in a
tree and she’s got Indian miniatures that are erotic
and she’s got a fan, a pink fan, and she looks all heartbroken
and bereft because she’s been abandoned by her lover—which
is how England would like to think the rest of the world felt
about them, the sun setting on the Empire.
ART:21:
Is there a word for that kind
of humor that you apply to your work?
FORD:
I guess it’s satire
or parody or any of that. And then there’s this idea
of sending up the whole form of discovery. In other words,
the mode of representation
that I use looks like 19th Century manuscript painting. It
looks like the kinds of notebooks that these colonial guys
kept where they did sketches of the local fauna and flora,
and named it after, you know, themselves and their own friends
and colleagues back in England or whoever first described
it. It wouldn’t matter that it might be known for thousands
of years in the culture
that was already there. These guys got the opportunity to
call it "Johnson’s this" or "So and So’s
that" and give it a Latin name and file it.
So I use those modes of representation to paint these things
as well. That turns that tradition a little bit on its head.
Rather than in the service of these great collections or empires,
it tells an alternative narrative. All of this makes it sound
like I have this great intellectual reason for making these
things, but ultimately I want to paint a sexy monkey, and
I want to paint a big, huge elephant with an erection. And
there’s this other sort of silly kind of underground
comic aspect to me that just wants to paint this stuff.
And it also comes from some personal inner reason that has
nothing to do with this sort of other thing. I often question
the intersect between the message as perceived (as a political
kind of “blah, blah, blah”) and my urge to just
make these pictures. Why do I feel the need to make these
things? Why is it that you want to make them as disturbing
as you can? Or as violent and out of control as you can? That
just comes from some place that doesn’t bear up under
theoretical discussion. And all artists are like that. They
get going and then they figure out—as they go—why
and what it all means in a weird way, and how it all ties
in.
I think I’m explaining it to myself with these slave-owning
ancestors. What exactly was it about, going down South when
I was boy? Was it seeing the end of that kind of thing? I
was born in 1960, so when I was a tiny boy in the South it
was a very different place. And we used to go down all the
time to see my grandmother in Georgia or my relatives in Virginia.
So I think maybe that had something to do with it. And in
Virginia there’d be this duck hunting and turkey hunting
kind of milieu. There was the great kind of southern gentleman,
naturalist sportsman tradition in my family that was still
being kind of held onto in spite of the fact that most of
family's wealth was, of course, gone with the wind...thank
god.
ART:21:
There's always that mixture of
glee and revulsion in your work. Can you talk about that some
more?
FORD:
The big, big thing I’m
always looking for in my work is a sort of attraction-repulsion
thing, where the stuff is beautiful to begin with until you
notice that some sort of horrible violence is about to happen
or is in the middle of happening. Or that it’s some sort
of interior monologue.
Take a figure like Audubon, who was kind of a madman. He was
violent. If he didn’t like you he might challenge you
to a duel or something. I mean the guy was completely out
of control and shooting birds off the deck of ships and watching
them drop in the ocean. On a riverboat trip down the Missouri
he’d shoot a coyote and wound it and it would run off
into the hills and he’d never see it again. He wasn’t
the enlightened sportsman that we’re used to thinking
about. Often when I paint something in his style, I try to
think that it’s almost like his dream state or something.
It’s like the way he really thought somehow betraying
itself and leaking into the work, infecting it somehow, giving
it a computer virus and making it do what it oughtn’t
do. Or what it shouldn’t reveal.
When you look at the Audubon painting of the passenger pigeons,
he just paints two little romantically involved passenger
pigeons. And there’s no implication that there were billions
of these birds that were getting reduced by the largest single
slaughter ever above the water vertebrates. You have no idea
that everyone was engaged in this wholesale slaughter of this
bird. There was a whole economy built on destroying these
birds and within fifty years they were all gone. That was
something that these guys didn’t allow into the work
somehow. And that’s what I put in the work. I want to
tell that story.
ART:21:
Is subverting the norm something
that you adopted from experience or did it come from looking
at art? Were you a subversive child?
FORD:
I was impossible, man... I came
out of that generation that turned into the punk
movement. It was partly that. There was this sort of moment
in time when you weren’t a hippie anymore. And you certainly
weren’t going to be a Reaganite—this is the generation
that has SUV’s and made up the idea of a five-dollar
cup of coffee and voted all these Republicans into office.
And I’m supposed embrace this bunch of clowns? I felt
that when I was a little kid. There was nothing cool about
it.
I was way too late for any kind of feeling of cohesiveness
with the ’60s. And by the time I was old enough to notice
these guys that I thought were cool when I was young, they
were all burnt out or dead. So I had no interest in being
one of those guys. And then I couldn’t do the punk thing
because that seemed too much like joining. That felt so militaristic
and lockstep. So there was this sort of ironic distance you
adopted in your twenties that had to do with a sort of arty,
snotty distance that you see in like the Talking Heads back
in those days. And I could kind of relate to that, but you
just didn’t know where to stand. And so yeah, there was
some idea of taking respected modes and screwing them up.
One of the things I think that confused people about my work
when they first saw it in New York was how close it is to
duck stamp art. Or the thing that you would put above your
living room couch. A very accepted mode and conservative mode
of representation. And that’s deliberate, but that was
misunderstood and it’s still misunderstood. I still have
trouble breaking down that last barrier to understanding my
work. There's an innate suspicion that some people have of
craft, of being able to paint or caring or giving a damn.
Not forging ahead in that modernist tradition of breaking
new ground and using new media. The fact that I would much
rather paint in ways that have been tried and true for hundreds
and hundreds of years. There’s so much bad art that’s
made that way and it’s hard to make people understand
what I’m up to.
