DAVID RATCLIFF
“Anything can be argued for or against. One strength of painting is its potential for a silent relationship with the viewer, especially when we are surrounded by voices insisting on attention.”
Interview by Nico Dregni, Contributor
Over the past two decades, David Ratcliff has produced a singular body of work that contends with a quintessentially American hard-drive, synthesizing a vast array of sources and influences. Responding to his first solo exhibition at Team Gallery in 2005, Michael Amy described the artist as a “Chronicler of glut;” Walead Beshty termed those early works “1980’s history paintings.” Most recently, a solo show of Ratcliff’s new paintings was presented at Team’s former Venice, CA project space, and his work was included in a group exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum.
Ratcliff lives and works in Los Angeles, and has exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo shows at Team Gallery, New York, Tomio Koyama, Tokyo, Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, and Maureen Paley, London. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Art Center College of Design, and the Turin Triennial. His work can be found in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Jump Collection, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
David and I conducted the following interview in a series of email exchanges in the fall of 2019, tracing some of the themes and processes that have long been central to his work or have emerged more recently. As a side note, he also sent me a link to Ocean Vuong’s reflection on the process for his most recent novel; something Vuong writes about seemed to resonate with David’s approach to painting, and I wanted to share a small portion of it here: “Using Kishōtenketsu, a narrative structure used in Chinese poetry, then later developed in Japanese storytelling, I was able to write about American violence without it becoming vital to the novel’s arc. It was important to me, at least in this book, that violence remain independent from any character’s self-worth, rendering it inert, terrible, and felt—but not a means of “development.” Through Kishōtenketsu, violence becomes fact and not a vehicle towards a climax.”
I wanted to start out in the studio, to get a sense of what the physical terrain of your practice looks like. You have piles of magazines and books, and surfaces covered by cut-out images, text bubbles, illustrations, the list goes on and on.
At present, how do you start collecting and sifting through material? Do you develop obsessions that lead you to search out specific sources, or is it more often about going down the rabbit hole of random finds at used bookstores or garage sale milk crates?
Ten years ago when I was pulling images exclusively from online sources I would, by necessity, search using specific keywords, nouns, adjectives, verbs. At that time I’d look for things that had some meaning for me, but I wouldn’t call them obsessions.
For the past maybe 5 years I’ve been using physical material I find in thrift shops, comic shops and used bookstores. Yes, usually random finds, although on a given day I might be more focused on a specific kind of image, nature or sports or pictures including text for example. At this stage I usually won’t question what might draw me to a book, comic, photo etc. I stay open, skimming. I don’t analyze the response. Sometimes I won’t find a use for it for several years.
I’ll make small-scale physical collages, which will then be developed into large paintings. I’ll have hundreds of torn or cut images on the table and floor, and sift through them until collages come together, often working on 5 or 6 works at one time. I need a large pile of material to pull from. I think there are artists who make sense of the world through a focused clarity, through narrowing their work or process. I can get into work like this, but it’s often like indulging in a fantasy-narrative of the deeply obsessed singularly-focused artist. I relate more to the artists who sift meaning from chaos and confusion. I think one struggle for painters in the US is how to make meaningful work without imposing meaning. This is why I use found images and found drawings.
David Ratcliff, Untitled (Sleepwalker), 2017, collage on paper, 18 x 12 inches
David Ratcliff, Untitled (Justice League), 2017, collage on paper, 18 x 12 inches
David Ratcliff, Untitled (Surprise Party), 2018, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 inches
David Ratcliff, Untitled, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 62 x 84 inches
David Ratcliff, Untitled (The Calling), 2018, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 84 inches
David Ratcliff, Untitled (Ka-Runch!), 2018, acrylic on canvas, 62 x 84 inches
A quality I really like about the paintings from your most recent solo, Basement Pyschedelia, is that they’re not “defensive,” don’t stake a stubborn claim to a bubble of meaning. They rely on a kind of saturated openness, in that they present a lot of information but judgments about meaning don’t feel pre-determined or necessary to enforce.
I’m not taking sides in the work. That’s up to the viewer.
I do believe on a personal level there is deep emotional, and perhaps a kind of transcendent spiritual value in art, but in a real-world economic context fine art is an ultra-luxury item and because of this I don’t think it makes sense to express political convictions in a way that comforts the audience.
Anything can be argued for or against. One strength of painting is its potential for a silent relationship with the viewer, especially when we are surrounded by voices insisting on attention.
Paintings not being time-based, and thus not offering a resolution, is among the other strengths and challenges of the medium. I think of your work as being especially adept at constructing a circulating, meandering space that pulls you in and guides you around. Although there isn’t a clear origin or end you can experience change, arcing or spiraling, which can be disorienting when you try to rationalize it and exhilarating when you let yourself just experience it.
I’ve been very interested in East Asian landscape painting and the idea that a fluid positive-negative space relationship creates a visual experience that is akin to wandering in a landscape. I certainly think this is true, compared with a composition built around perspective and the illusion of deep space. Sometimes I think the 60’s counterculture, heavily influenced by Asia, was on some level the West coming to grips with a visual space that is not rational.
On that note, my impression is that there are three parts of the world - Los Angeles, New York, and Japan - that have been important for you at different points in your life.
You graduated from Pratt in 1992, spent much of that decade traveling, and had your first group showings and solo at Team Gallery in 2005. I’m curious about your early experience making work, and figuring out as, an individual, ‘how to make a painting.’
NY was essential in my development as an artist. There was Pratt and Ft. Green/Clinton Hill, but also the exposure to work in galleries and museums. I still consider the Sigmar Polke retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 1991 to be the most important show I’ve experienced in terms of long-lasting influence.
Now, as an artist based in LA, I recognize that the years I spent outside the US have been fundamental to the formation of my understanding of what America should look like and as a result what kind of painting I should do. Years ago, however, living in Japan, I had a hard time making meaningful art because I no longer had a reference as to what made sense in the culture, and couldn’t intuitively feel what I should do. Initially, I couldn’t speak or read the language, and even after I developed a certain degree of proficiency I felt like most of my energy was spent figuring out how to live in the new environment. As you said, I hadn’t at that time figured out how to make a painting. I hadn’t internalized the process yet.
Returning to NY I found a good size studio and experimented with painting on newspaper photos and then printing them with the then-new large-scale inkjet printers, but I didn’t really get my bearings until I moved out to LA in 2002. California made sense to me because it is constantly reinforced by fiction, and other forms of belief, and therefore it is easy to place oneself in the story. And to want to be there.
David Ratcliff, Fireplace, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 inches
David Ratcliff, Faces, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 inches
David Ratcliff, 2006, 2008, acrylic and spray-paint on canvas, 102 x 88 inches
When you moved (back) to Los Angeles, you shared a studio complex with Amanda Ross-Ho and Sterling Ruby (among others). What did that return to Los Angeles yield, and how have you seen the city change in the time since?
There were a dozen or so artists in the Hazard Park Complex. Despite the brutal summer heat, a few lived in the building. It was an important, formative experience for me, working in close proximity to so many great artists, especially since I didn’t go to grad school. Everyone was beginning to show and it was an exciting time. Those of us on a daytime schedule would get lunch together and then go back to work. It was great. Sterling put together a show of our work at Christian Nagel and we all went to Berlin for that.
Previously I lived in K-Town, and am now Downtown, which is a pretty shocking combination of tent-city and fairly upscale high-rises without much in between. At the same time, it feels like maybe the most honest part of LA right now. Everything is left out in the open. No attempt to hide.
The paintings in your first shows sourced most of their images from online searches and indicated a digital vastness that can’t be filled or satiated (try as we might). When did you make a turn towards printed matter, and what has kept you gravitating towards those sources?
I like working with paper. The tactile activity has value in itself. In contrast, the screen-based digital process doesn’t have value beyond being a useful tool. The physical world is limited, decisive and fixed. Once the paper is cut and glued down it can’t be easily altered. The digital world can be manipulated indefinitely, which is part of what makes it so ungrounded.
I turned towards printed matter around the time that social media really began to dominate the online experience, when images tended to have already been widely circulated, shared, spread.
It seems like stepping outside the endless manipulation and circulation of digital material might also connect to how your work relates to subcultures. Artists using externally-sourced material often focus on the dominant culture through its own products, which, as with any strategy, is limited to some degree. By contrast, going back to the earliest work you’ve tended to look to the margins of popular culture, to sources that present an outsider stance or perspective. Are the subcultures what you’re interested in, or the edges and peripheries where the pathological undercurrents of mass culture are emphasized or can be escaped?
There is belief made visible in subcultures, and this is what I’m interested in. The American mainstream culture does not demonstrate belief in any meaningful way. There are very real events that affect everything in American life, but the genuine responses to those events can be seen in subcultures, not in the mainstream. Subcultures have to by definition, and to exist, express belief in ways that the mainstream culture does not. My sense is that the most pathological culture is the mainstream and yes, escape or resistance plays a large role. Of course it’s very difficult to say what mainstream culture is, compared with the relative ease of identifying a subculture.
David Ratcliff, Klan Paintings, 2014, team (gallery, inc), New York, NY, installation view
David Ratcliff, Klan Paintings, 2014, team (gallery, inc), New York, NY, installation view
David Ratcliff, Klan Paintings, 2014, team (gallery, inc), New York, NY, installation view
For your 2014 exhibition, Klan Paintings, you made a body of work utilizing official internal documents from the KKK: incident reports, order forms, meeting minutes, etc. An extreme violence and hatred is couched within a kind of bureaucratic banality; the ideology of the Klan is implicit in all the works, but it also takes an exterior knowledge to fully comprehend it because the dry formal affect of the material is not that dissimilar from what we might encounter through, say, a government agency or utility company.
In those paintings you addressed whiteness in such an emphatically direct manner, which illuminated for me how it has always been a subject of your work, that to look at American culture and history is to perceive a culture and history pervaded by a violence founded on whiteness. The show is also making claims about the production of culture, specifically painting, that address race, complacency or normalization. How did these works come about, and what was the response they provoked?
Around the time I made the Klan Paintings, there was a popular, blatantly market-driven brand of abstract painting that turned a blind eye to the on-the-ground meaning of $100,000. I wanted to directly acknowledge the privilege and the brutal racist framework that all of this, the art, galleries, museums, education… that it all sits on. I chose the documents because personally I don’t feel I have the license to use figurative images of racist violence. The documents were open. Blank forms. As you mentioned without judgment, and it was left up to the viewer to decide what to think.
For the most part difficult content is generally not within what is acceptable in painting. It somehow falls outside of expectations. This is partly a result of the necessity of poetry. I had been thinking about how in literature difficult content is not at all unusual. I wonder if it has something to do with the relative public nature of experiencing painting, in a real space on a wall, compared with the relative private experience of a novel. Our reactions and endorsement of painting is in a way on display, so perhaps we are more self-conscious about how we respond. We don’t want to be anti-social or appear somehow wrong. Thinking about the contrast between other narrative forms like film––while paintings are narrative, they aren’t time-based, so there is no real resolution. Nothing gets answered, there is no justice, nobody is saved.
In terms of response, I’m not sure. I talked to a few people at the opening. I was sweating, I felt exposed. They aren’t paintings one stands proudly in front of.
In many cases, your work involves a considerable amount of labor that isn’t visible or immediately evident, and in a similar way, the paintings often depict less ‘the thing itself’ than the surrounding context. To talk about a culture of waste and excess, you might address those topics/themes as they filter through the visual language of comics, or pornography, or even a rendering style that is expressly minimal and direct. That “adjacent” approach is almost the opposite of the Klan Paintings, but at the same time, they feel united in looking at the ways in which brutal and ugly ideologies are integrated into material that appears to be innocuous.
This quality might be thought of in terms of abstraction, making something feel readable, but not necessarily legible. Where does your work sit in relation to abstraction?
I think I use the periphery because it is a hazy experience, is perceived with less certainty than one which can be named, isolated, or understood. Yes, in a sense the use of documents and not depictions or descriptions of actual racial violence would be considered showing the periphery.
One of the best shows I’ve seen in the past few years was Paul Schimmel’s last show at MOCA, Destroy the Picture, Painting the Void, 1949 to 1962. Most of the work was very physical abstract painting from Italy, Germany, and Japan, painting in the post-war period when value systems, having been torn apart, opened up a bleak void where solid cultural meaning once existed. I think the best abstract work still exists in front of this existential void, and I’m not sure it is possible in the same way with figurative painting. I think if an artist can take figurative content and translate it wholly, successfully, into an abstract form… that is something rare and great. It is something I reach for on some level, an impossible ideal.
David Ratcliff, The Post Clinton Presidency, 2011, acrylic and spray-paint on canvas, 64 x 50 inches
David Ratcliff, Let Them Eat Cake And Ice Cream, 2011, acrylic and spray-paint on canvas, 64 x 50 inches
David Ratcliff, Portraits and Ghosts, 2011, team (gallery, inc), New York, NY, installation view
David Ratcliff, Portraits and Ghosts, 2011, team (gallery, inc), New York, NY, installation view
Your work has often been spoken of as relating to history painting, a genre with a strong grounding in narrative. However, in your works it’s almost as though the composition makes narrative sense, but it isn’t quite possible to make sense of the narrative itself - are there paintings you conceive of as having or responding to a specific narrative? Do you employ other means of structuring a work, or narrative itself?
In order for a painting of mine to work aesthetically there needs to be a balance, and sometimes a hierarchy, within the text clippings, headlines, images, and abstract formal elements. I do see major cultural events here and there in the paintings, but in the same way these events act as lenses for any kind of cultural experience or analysis, so they’re not necessarily in the paintings as much as part of the context. More recently I’ve discovered, sometimes quite after the fact, narrative elements that could be related to things that have happened in my personal life. This always surprises me a bit, because I have valued distance in the past.
In the Basement Psychedelia paintings I let the narrative shift, blur, and refocus. A state of flux in the immediate present, where nothing is solid and certainty is palpable just beyond grasp. Too often history is hollowed out, simplified, and used as a kind of bolster, so I’m reluctant to call attention to the original contexts of the source imagery. I prefer to attempt to see it as it is in front of me. I’m not at all saying that sources are irrelevant. There are many images I wouldn’t feel that I have the right to use. Photographic images of real bodily violence, or mourning, for example. My using such an image could only disrespect the original.
David Ratcliff, Untitled (Stars), 2015, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 48 inches
I was thinking about your work in terms of speed and time, how they compress and expand temporal relationships and narratives, and how the aesthetic “dating” of the material functions. Terry Gilliam said his movie Brazil was located, “everywhere in the 20th century, whatever that means.” Because futuristic works inevitably quaintly evoke the past in which they were actually made, Gilliam turns that quality into a coherent comic aesthetic; it seems like you perhaps do something similar with your work.
The paintings use images from past and present. Everything is taken from found sources. I’ll use photographic images up until the present, but these days I rarely use found drawings from more recent than a couple decades back. There have been times when I would use an image with a written or printed date, and the date would end up in the painting. At the time I saw it as a kind of escape from the pressures of the present, but now I see dates more in terms of nostalgia, and recently I’m less interested in including them in the paintings. But on one level I don’t think we register images from the past as actually being from the past in a way that fundamentally differentiates them from more contemporary images. Just like I don’t think we really make a distinction between fiction and non-fiction when it comes to stories.
The star paintings are probably the only works I’ve done that indicate some moment in the future, yet to be. The stars were falling.
All images courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery
