Simplicity is the word we associate most with the paintings of Robert Mangold (bn. 1937). Known for "situating" simple organic structures (drawing) within the frame (shape) of his paintings, Mangold has distilled a certain essence at painting's core, its basic language so to speak. Part of that Minimalist generation, his very early work consisted in "reconstructions" of the shapes created by the spaces between buildings. Since then Mangold has been working at this tension between painting-as-image and painting-as-object, between the organic and the geometric. It is his succinct and deadpan drawing, not to mention those rolled-on colours, that has given his mature work its verve and sense of measured pleasure. Through a system of variants and series, Mangold has slowly been working towards a Matissian sort of grace.

Robert Mangold is currently exhibiting column paintings at the Lisson Gallery in London (till 30/04/05).

Additional Info
CV
Guggenheim bio
Robert Mangold and Thomas Nozkowski
Works in Tate Collection
Images
Installation view at PaceWildenstein (1997)
PaceWildenstein review (11/2004)
Art in America review (02/2003)
KF images

This interview was conducted at the Lisson Gallery on 15/03/05

Sherman Sam: So you're a baseball fan?

Robert Mangold: A baseball fan? Yes, I've been a baseball fan for many years. Actually American football too, but less now than many years ago...

SS: Not soccer? Our football.

RM: No, well, when I was growing up no one was playing it at the time. I do watch the World Cup but I'm not knowledgeable about it the way I am with other games. I went out to play baseball, I tried to play it in high school, and football I love too as a spectator.

SS: I had a teacher in college who enjoyed baseball because, for him, it was the only game where the ball determined the game.

RM: It's such an incredibly logical game... If the ball gets there before you do or if they tag you with the ball, it's really built on a system. And even though the speed of man has increased, the distances to first base and second base, in terms of stealing bases and running, those dimensions that were set out so long ago still hold in terms of a test of the defence versus offence. It's a great game because it's about one person pitching and one person hitting, so at that moment it's one to one, yet it's also a team sport...

SS: When I was reading about your work, I wondered if your work was "rule based", but actually there really is a "feel" or "sensitivity" to what you do...

RM: Each series of works I do have a set of consistent rules , that is all the works in the series share certain characteristics, but they're arbitrary rules that I've decided upon. Lets say I'm going to use an irregular quadrilateral shape and the bottom edge is going to be parallel to the floor and the ellipse I draw on it touches four sides, so that will be consistent through the whole series. Then when I get to the point where I want to vary that, it becomes a new series. So they are rule based to a degree, but they are also just slightly capricious rules...

SS: And do you consciously sit down and say well it's going to be like this or is it the result of an organic process?

RM: It's a slightly organic process. I start doing little drawings in sketchbooks of ideas and think, "okay, that's interesting, and if I did this, what would happen". Then I begin to feel what's important in the idea, whether what's variable and what isn't variable. I flip that around in my head a l ittle bit until I get what I think is a situation that will allow a certain number of permutations and variations without being incredibly dogmatic about all the steps.

SS: I noticed that you have a nice catalogue of very early work out too.

RM: When I had the show at the Stedelijk, I decided that I would start my professional career with certain works, because they were like a starting point. But there were works before that, the dealer Peter Freeman in New York, tried to uncover these earlier works. Umm... I thought of them as transitional, you know from things I was doing in art school to what happened later. But now I think it's kind of interesting to see the connections. As I say when I did the Stedelijk show, I said, it all starts here, but there were works before... many! [laughs]

SS: We all have those... in our closet!

RM: Exactly.

SS: There was a point when those early things seem related to Ellsworth Kelly in this way of looking at spaces and shapes created by the negatives shapes in the world. Then there was a moment when it became something else... At some point your work stopped being about things and being sort of "things" and "not things" at the same time.

RM: Yeah, first of all, I loved getting out of school and coming to the City and thinking of myself as a real artist and not a student artist. The thing I loved about living in lower Manhattan, at least at that time anyway, was that it very industrial, lots of trucks, noise... I just soaked it all in. One of the things that struck me was that you see everything in fragments. You walk along the street, you see the bottom of the building, or you see a truck go by and you see part of a sign, you see a painting on a brick wall, you know where paint goes over the top of the bricks. In a subway station where posts and walls are painted dark to a certain point and light above it, so the station is cut in half. So, anyway, I was enjoying this relation of paint to architecture, for me it was a real starting point. The early paintings were wall sections and things like that. Which were literally made as if you were making a wall, with wall materials and commercial products and that was a beginning.

Then at a certain point we spent the summer in the country. Someone we met had bought a place in the country and traded our living there with barn painting. I grew up in the country in western New York and I always thought of the country as a negative cultural situation where you dealt with weather and problems, with crops or whatever it was. It was always down to earth and not about imagining things, so I was not sure what it would be like living in the country and trying to work on painting. What I saw in the country was rolling hills and this sense of organic curves, but in a funny sort of way, I couldn't deal with that. So I started doing paintings that were shaped like parts of circles, which dealt with the curve, something that I hadn't thought of in terms of the urban environment. So in a way the curving idea, that is still a part of my work, came to me from nature even though I've never worked with organic curves. They've always been measured not mechanical because they've been hand drawn, they all hit their points... it's as though there's a precision about them.

SS: They are hand drawn though?

RM: Yes, it's mechanically plotted, and it has to do with the interval of points. If I were to use a compass and there is a curve to the right then the left, it becomes very choppy. There's no transition of the curve from one to the other. When I was a little kid, the best thing you could have was a train set, and if you put a curved track going this way, then another going that way, every time it goes round the train just falls over. Drawing is a similar kind of thing, there has to be a transition.

SS: It just seems like your work although there are all these allusions to Greek culture, there is a real resistance to any kind of way to speak about it except in a straight forward sense, "that's geometry" or "those are a series that look like..." I assume that in your generation you did not plan for these things to happen.

RM: Yes. The work is a kind of "blind navigating"; you come up with an idea and you see a certain destination, then later on it comes to a close when you feel you've exhausted everything that came with that thought and you have to somehow shift directions or add something else, a new dimension... But in terms of the references, I've always been a matter-of-fact with titles because I didn't wanted to tag on ideas. So a person comes in and says, "ah, I get it! This is about something or other." To me one of the beauties of really abstract painting, is that people can take it, relate it to their own experience... I would think that if a painting of mine fell out of a plane into another culture somewhere, they'd have a way of relating to it, because it's totally open in terms of relating to humanist impulses and sensibilities. And not like a lot of art today that is so specific in terms of our culture at the moment.

SS: Well how do you feel about the fact that in our current artworld, it seems as if your work has a different place from where all the attention is.

RM: If you live a long life and paint for many years, these things come and go, there are periods when everyone's interested, and periods when they are less interested, or all those who are interested are people of your age, and the younger people are into something else. Then a certain time goes by and they reconnect in another way. Hopefully it's a short term situation and if you go on doing your work in a way that's as honest as you can, it will connect with certain people at certain times but not all people at all times.

SS: I found this brilliant quote of yours, "I learnt to accept being referred to as a 'Minimal painter' because it connects my work to a particular time and place, about 1965-75 New York City."

RM: I think that's true, because at the time of the Minimal movement it was primarily a sculptural movement. [Robert] Ryman wasn't considered a "Minimal" painter, all the people of my generation who were painters were considered outside of Minimalism for a period, then suddenly you were being called a "Minimalist", which was fine. The first exhibition in which they tried to pinpoint that area was called Systemic Painting, but it had a lot to do with the sculpture of the times. A lot of my inspiration comes from sculpture in terms of what I do or think about, because it has to do with a drawn element that is inside of a container, and there is a kind of sense of weight and of things being gravity related...

SS: Hence, the interest in Greek vases?

RM: Right.

SS: A perfect metaphor. There is a sense with your work of holding, as if the physicality of the structure is holding the drawing; and this constant tension between the thing that is represented and the thing that it is. Richard Schiff writes a bit about this in his catalogue essay. He refers to this "in-betweenness" that creates this experience of the artwork.

RM: It's what really interests me about painting, this idea that a painting is an object and is really not an object. That when you're in a room with paintings on the walls, it's not that it's not an object but it has a different kind of status as object. It's not necessarily illusionistic, but it's reality is different than the tables or chairs in that room.

SS: Coming back to this show, these paintings are tall even for you.

RM: Yes, they're the tallest paintings I've ever made. I made them thinking that if something has to exist as a column it's got to be bigger than you, it has to exist in relation to the architecture. I do smaller versions as studys but in full size they are at least 10 feet tall.

SS: There's normally a kind of austerity to your work, but these have a slight whimsical quality. Especially in this one from 2003...

RM: Yes, they were the first column paintings.

SS: Like going to a disco... [laughter]

RM: With some of them, people come and say it's like dancing and someone else will bring up, the structure of DNA... or sound waves, etc. But some of them are funny, curves can be humorous in a way that squares can't [laughs].

SS: Well... I'll note that in my diary. That lime green one downstairs is terribly loud.

RM: That's a colour I've recently tried using, there're just three or four works in that colour. My studies for the paintings are done in pastel, and you know pastel has a very luminous quality and the paintings are in acrylic, so one of the challenges in terms of painting was to have the same kind of luminosity in the colour that I get in the pastels. The way I believe I accomplish this is by using the acrylic paint thin, like a watercolour, so it allows light through to the ground and reflects back.

SS: How many layers do you actually use?

RM: Sometimes four, sometimes three... There may be the odd one with two, but usually it's built up. The very earliest ones were more opaque. Anyway that lime green is wonderfully pastel-like, and I thought that's a great colour.

SS: It's a very contemporary colour.

RM: There was colour like that which was very big in the '60s, day-glo or something, where there was a yellow-green or very cool yellow, a red-orange, maybe a couple of others, but they were colours that were used a lot in Minimal sculpture at that point.

SS: Finally, it struck me with seeing these works that they had a real Matissian spirit.

RM: I think the Matisse connection is very fair, I've been interested and thought about Matisse for a long time. The work that interests me the most are the studies and three versions of the Barnes mural, The Dance where it's this very odd eccentric shape. If you see that shape outside of the "architecture" all by itself, it's quite extraordinary just as a shape and then as what's inside the shape. To me, that's what I do. It's the same thing just in a different way.

SS: Well, there you go!

Sherman Sam is an artist and writer. He is on staff at KultureFlash and contributes to Contemporary and Third Text. His drawings can be viewed at the Flix project in the Rubicon Gallery and are included in the travelling show, Plan D (currently at Rubicon, and will be at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo, Ireland from 23/06 to 07/08).

Image © Robert Mangold, courtesy Lisson Gallery