I COULD SEE EVERYTHING, painting, notes & catalogue, 2014-2008
“Works for this series were exhibited as an exhibition catalogue for a museum I made up and located in the Yukon, The Road at the Top of the World Museum.”
5D: Why is the new book a catalogue for an exhibit that never was held?
MW: Painting can sometimes be an introverted act that involves an extroverted fantasy – a fantasy that maybe one can see more clearly, or touch, or change, or rearrange the world by painting it. Paintings have always sort of been asking ‘Is this real, or more real?’ In the case of painting a banana you might be asking ‘Can you see the value in this banal thing now that it is not exactly real?’ Or, in the case of painting death personified engaged in killing a swan, you might be asking ‘How are my instincts part of the real world?’
With all of us wondering now, in our world of computer screens, ‘What’s real and what’s not real?’ or ‘What has value and what doesn’t?’ painting can be an ideal place, this flat place, to test out these questions of ‘real’ and ‘value’ as it’s always done. ‘What could be real?’ sounds so optimistic as I say it, but binding your imagination only to what could be real can make you feel empowered but also painfully cautious and sometimes defeated.
But anyway, with so many contemporary options for representation, this painter’s instinct to constantly press ‘What’s real, or what could be?’ can now so easily extend beyond a painting. So a catalogue for an exhibit that was never held, about art made far away from the world while trying to touch it so desperately, was a natural extension of the work. Everything about the book is real, from the writers to the curator to the street the museum is located on, but it’s not real, or it’s as real as painting.
-Margaux Williamson in interview with Craig Taylor from Five Dials
Curated by Ann Marie Peña and published by Coach House Books in 2014. Edited by Alana Wilcox; with essays from Ann Marie Peña, Leanne Shapton, Mark Grief & David Balzer and an interview with Chris Kraus.
Some of the work was exhibited at Goldfinch Gallery in Chicago 2019, Agnes Ethrington Art Centre in Kingston 2015, Frith Street Gallery in London 2014 & the Katharine Mulherin Gallery in New York 2014.