Conversation with Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas: I have never worked really from nature or from natural observation. There was a time, and maybe that comes a bit from my old love, abstract expressionism, where I, well, I was almost principally against the fact. I thought it was a very stupid thing to do because the thing of, although, I mean, it was a bit simplified thinking of my part too, but that was about how the thinking was in those days that to try to capture something of this real tree or this real person. It look like to me like a very stupid thing to do because painting is so unnatural. It is so much not the natural thing, that the conflict between the natural object or the and also because I actually was never interested in how things looked from the outside. You see, there was the other conflict, which why I also for a long time stayed away from the human figure in paintings because I thought if you want to say something about emotional states and relationships between people, that was sort of what I thought I wanted to do. And then if you would actually paint two figures, say kissing or something, you get an illustration of the fact you don't get closer to the fact. You can rather have a band at Newman. So, but at a certain stage I thought, okay, well, I mean, it wasn't like that, okay, I wake up one day and I think that, but this long struggle dealing with these type of problems. I thought, well, if you, if when you use a photograph, you are already busy with a distorted reality. You are already in another flat realm. You're not in the three dimensional realm of natural life. And yeah, so I quite like that idea. It gave me a freedom because photography is closer to the, in a strange way, with all its problems, it is closer to the natural world in the sense of the fact that it can document, even if the documentation is a bias to everything, you can still use it as a, or it is used also as a documentary thing. So you can more easily talk in form or television or photographic mediums of a difference between documentation and fiction. Well, painting, there's nothing, I mean, you can't really document. Yeah, I mean, okay, it's, yeah, you get into all kinds of philosophical problems there. But so you see, for a while I thought the collage technique was a good solution of the two. So you, I used images, photographic images, then older works, which relate in different ways to works I now do in painting. I had an old work called "Crimes of Passion", and then it was all people who was, who were killed in the beds. But the photographs were so unclear that it looked a bit like expressionistic blobs, but because it was in the context of the book and all these supposedly documentary things, you accepted it as such. And I combined that with gestures of my own to just put it very simply. But, so for a while I thought the collage gives you a bit of everything, but then formally also, yeah, it becomes a bit, yeah, a bit boring. I think that's what happened to a lot of American art also. You have the, I try to then later blow up the image a bit like Baldessari, blow up the image and then, and in the sense blow up my own handwriting. But I didn't like that at all. Also, when I used smaller collages, the intimacy of a small photograph was very different from when you blew it up. Just the fact that the scale changed, made, also changed the content. So the fact that you like to draw doesn't mean that therefore you are an artist. So I always doubted my own capacity in the whole thing. And that was the, what was the question?

Robert Fleck: It's the studying of psychology at university.

MD: Oh psychology, yeah. But so I thought, you know, and art is too egocentric, yeah. So I thought then I would become a art therapist, so then I will do painting. You know, it took me a very long time also to admit to the fact that, okay, that is what I do. That I will call myself an artist because I will, I used to call myself a student for a long time. And yeah, I did. I also found a bit of an embarrassing term. I would never say to someone, are you an artist? French do that? I would say, "Do you also do art?" I find that a bit embarrassing in our town then.

RF: And in the psychology, were you more interested in experimental psychology or in psychoanalysis?

MD: Yeah, you know, I, why I stopped it also is I couldn't understand statistics. I found statistics such a strange thing that it, that I, and the whole thing. So I didn't get that fight in the two years. No, so no, I had like, I was pleased due to, I mean, psycho analysis and behaviourism and all those things, I just sort of like to help sort of throw them a little bit of everything together. So I liked, but I didn't really get that far with anything because I got stuck with the statistics and also I thought that one could, in the beginning, it is quite boring. And also the, I was sometimes a Guinea pig in some of these things. And I also disliked lots of the experiments. I found them quite stupid.

RF: In your paintings and in your drawings too, the relation to the language is very important In the drawing, it's like, it's on the drawing very often. And in the painting, it's the title of the painting. And then in your solo exhibitions, you gave a text to the exhibition of what has this from as function for you, for the work and so.

MD: Yeah, well, it was very clear to me already from a long time that paintings, but not only paintings, well, there you have John Berger, all those people has written much better books on it than I can tell. But the fact indeed that you can use a painting for anything, and you can sell, indeed, ice cream or perfume. So it is not the image. The image has since Age of Reproduction, it has come loose. So and I'm also there often misunderstood because in Holland, lots of people, they always say, "Oh yeah, I, you know, have brought meaning back to the." Because, also, I have a lot of female fans because they're just so pleased that there's a woman who's also doing a painting, but they're often, you know, people love you for, but to the wrong, not totally wrong reasons, but simplified reasons. But I don't think that things can exist without a context. And if you don't give the context, then you know, somebody else gives it.