Interview with Izhar Patkin
Spring 1986, New York City
by Herbert Muschamp
Stedelijk Museum catalog, 1990

HM: One of the surprise entertainments of The Black Paintings you showed last spring (at the Limbo Gallery, New York City) was to watch the reaction of the viewer. It was though you took them by the hand over the threshold Into the idea of narrative In contemporary art – It was done on such a big scale and With such an explicit literary connection to Genet's play that they couldn't miss It- but once they were Inside there seemed to be a language problem. It was like watching a group of travelers entering a foreign country and trying to order a meal. There was food allover the place but no Berlitz handbook. The waiters didn't understand the useful formalist words and phrases. So I thought we could begin our conversation by describing some of the philosophical features of Narrative Country.
IP: Well, the terrain is the voided center left by the Enlightenment's dismissal of God, and the reason for the language problem is that the idea of narrative has been so long suppressed, sacrificed, to the cult of form because of its notorious ties to that exiled central authority. The idea was to establish the autonomy of art by liberating the artist from the job of illustrator to the Master Storyteller. The point of using narrative today, in turn, is to walk off the job of illustrating the Master Story of Modern Art. Or maybe just to look for a better job, something a bit more rewarding than moving the shapes around.

HM: To recognize, in other words, that formalism's pretence of objective truth was itself a romantic narrative which began as a bill of rights and ended up, as a gag order.
IP: Calling my show The Black Paintings was polemical in that sense, because even formalists like Reinhardt and Stella used black metaphorically, to tell a story of which they were acutely conscious, about Modernism as a tale of our collective progress. My intention in the paintings was to fluff up the narrative structure of the form-making process so that you couldn't miss it.

HM: Some viewers, though, were concerned that they might be missing something In the work because they weren't familiar With Genet's text and couldn't 'read' It from your work. But the point you seemed to be making is that with narrative painting you don't have to know 'the story', but you might want to know the story.
IP: People are right to be suspicious about narrative, because the old form of narrative said that you have to know a Bible. But formalism became a Bible too. The new form of narrative is about making room for stories that you do not know. It is not a literary process. The work is not illustrating the narrative, it is generated by it in a visual medium. We had our Modern grid, it was generated by one story, and we made it very well. Now let's look at some others.

HM: We had our church, we had our steeple, now let's open all the doors and see all the people. Narrative is just a tool for ordering experience, I went out, I traveled, I met a man, I heard a story, here it is. Years before 'appropriation' became a standard visual tactic, Joanne Kyger wrote something great: 'Even If I only repeat what others say, it becomes mine'. It may be dumb or smart, true or not, but it's my version.
IP: Narrative is about allowing yourself to be a narrator, about empowering your internal authority to write its own script. You don't have to be God to be a narrator; you're allowed to do it because you woke up that morning, had coffee, made some phone calls, heard some great gossip. You don't have to run a marathon to get to the Center of things before you've got your story.

HM: So behind your curtains lurks a different model of self.
IP: It's not the self as a candidate for the vacant center. It's me, it's not, please, Lord, let it be me. It's the self as a messy drawer or container. It is enough that the information, the notes, the memories, projects, emotions, are all in it. They don't have to be organized in any hierarchy.

HM: Unless you're In a hierarchical mood that morning.
IP: Yes, the Center as a mood; God at breakfast, fallen Angels over toast at lunch.

HM:What was impressive about The Black Paintings was not your use of narrative but your openness in doing so, your refusal to be enigmatic about it. The story of 'the enigma' seems to be the story of being afraid about the professional consequences if you break the gag order.
IP: Even in figurative and abstract painting today there is a denial of narrative and a celebration of ennui; this is an acceptable form of ‘passing' as form. Everyone would be scared to death if Napoleon really showed up but they also get alarmed when someone refuses to put on their Napoleon costume, or puts the hat on backwards with the price tag dangling. I'm more interested in breathing than heroics. Funnels and Trumpets. Take it in, dump it out. Narrative comes into play when you discover that the air around you doesn't exist in the same way without you; but you don't own it. And it doesn't own you; ripping up the script if the part doesn't suit you is an important function of narrative. I want to shred the script that identified art exclusively with heroic struggle.

HM: That's a traditional function of the comic script. Aristotle's Theory was that the origins of tragedy and comedy lay in the two parts of the ritual of succession In the ancient Greek fertility cult. Tragedy arose from the 'agon' in which the young pretender challenged the old ruler and fights him to the death. Comedy arose from the 'kosmos', the wedding procession and celebration. In the ritual of Modern Art, young pretenders are called upon to challenge and defeat the rule of stale convention in order to insure the fertility of the culture. Your work seems to be about Inaugurating the second part of the cycle, about the use of comedy as 'the ultimate civilizer', as Meredith called it.
IP: For me, this cycle started with the Meta-Bride work I showed at Holly Solomon a few years ago. It was about a black bride torn apart by a Snow White complex. The importance of comedy to me is that it allows more stories to enter into our homogeneous experience, and it infuriates a lot of people that it does this. It is not just black and white fighting till the death; the audience has a story to tell too.

HM: Rather than strive for the idea of essence, your work Seems to go for the doorway, the threshold where the dualisms collapse,
IP: One of the points of black paintings is that you cannot seperate color from a metaphoric use, but you can transform the metaphor. People aren't black and white, they are brown or pinkish maybe. Every painter knows that there is no pure black or pure white; try to find the polarities with blue black, green black, red black. Dualisms were invented for the upper hand's gain of power. My objective was not a reversal, not to put black where white is usually put, but to liberate the metaphor from the stereotype. Black isn't hell, bad luck, the eclipse, evll, darkness, the abyses. ln Genet's play the Blacks try to live up- or down to these stereotypes, and they fail. But in my work they don't even have to fail, and they don't have to succeed, either. They are playing a game that I invented.

HM: I thought the power of the show lay not In the cease-fire of the battle between black and white but in the collapse of the dualism between self and environment. This is something that probably can't be understood through photographs of the work; it depended on the way the work surrounded the viewer; the way the viewer entered Into the room through the work itself, changing it on their entrance; on the scale of the figures, the fact that the figures were at once flattened into the two dimensions of a picture plane and also, because of the curtain folds, protruded into the spectator's space,
IP: The most common interpretation of Genet's play and of his Instruction that the play be performed by black actors before a white audience, concerns the idea of the Other. But I wanted to suggest that the 'other' can be experienced on a more fundamental level than alienation or cultural exoticism; that the entire environment we move through, everything from the skin outward, is 'the other'. The world is 'other' even when its our own world, even when the environment is nothing but a screen for our own projections. You can flatten it, give it more dimension, get scared by it, turn it into wall paper, flirt with it, feel sorry for it, just as any figure in the environment can do all these things to you.