Cloud Cover: an interview with Robyn Penn

In November and December of 2011, Johannesburg artist Robyn Penn showed 'Pretty World' at David Krut Projects at ArtsOnMain. Michael mith chatted to her about repetition, irony and contemplating the aesthetics of the horrific image.

Michael Smith: Robyn, this show is something of a departure from your previous show at Brodie/Stevenson. How did the development of this new body of work happen?

Robyn Penn: ‘Brutal Year’ was my first. That body of work dealt with a particular period in my life: the works mirrored an extended time where my everyday was a place of ‘between-ness’. What all my work has in common is the influence of Romantic painter Caspar Friedrich, writer/poet Charles Bukowski, a sublime preoccupation with the sky, multiple images, my interest in neuroscience and my relationship with the world.

This body of work started with small ink drawings and gouache paintings of the surface of the ocean and of Muybridge’s clouds. I was interested in the sameness of sky and water. Sky and clouds resonate for me, providing a necessary quiet from the chaos happening on the ground and an easy metaphor for distractions. In this sense, Muybridge’s clouds were marvellous. He photographed dramatic clouds and then ‘photo-shopped’ them into his landscapes to provide more depth. He re-used the same clouds in several different landscapes. Referencing Muybridge led me to the idea of ‘clouds added’ to the landscape and the notion that we very often add metaphorical clouds to our landscapes. And, of course, there have been some extremely potent, very real clouds added by humans to landscapes. This is how I started looking at atomic bomb clouds.

MS: The title of the show seems to suggest you are dealing in irony: an exhibition of images of atomic clouds titled ‘Pretty World’?

RP: For me the reality of life is like a Charles Bukowski poem - brutal and beautiful in the same breath. You can’t use an image like an atomic cloud and not speak of horror on some level. I remember watching a BBC documentary on the Hiroshima/Nagasaki disasters and seeing interviews with survivors of the atomic bombs. They were recalling what they were doing at the time the bombs were falling in the sky above them, before they exploded; they were banal things. An old man recalled that he was a young boy and was counting. A woman recalled, as a girl, that she was preparing a tray of tea. I borrowed the title of my show from songwriter Sam Baker. His lyrics bring me back to the humanness of the everyday. Even in a disaster there is the day, parts of it unfettered by our influence.

The atomic clouds signify the chaos of my every day. The domestic madness of the space I work in is a fractured space. The constant noise and interruption caused a shift in my work from sublime skyscapes to explosive clouds.

MS: Do you think, with the ubiquity of disaster images, that television and film viewers have become desensitized to their horror, and can begin to contemplate their aesthetics? I remember the hullabaloo about Damien Hirst stating that the perpetrators of the 911 attacks on the World Trade Centre ‘needed congratulating’. He said, ‘The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually.’

RP: On some level, sure. My seven year-old never fails to freak me out when he declares that killing a person on his TV games is not violent, because they don’t really die! I watched a video of an atomic bomb explosion, it was truly beautiful, mesmerizing, which only made it more horrific.

When I was making these prints the first ‘pull’ was often just made up of soft colour. The images were just pretty with no binary tension, which I felt just couldn’t be left like that. I had to rework the images, accentuating shadows and making marks which although fine and delicate retained something of the scariness of the cloud. I can’t look at these images without seeing both the beauty and the horror of the mushroom cloud.

MS: Plus there’s the repetition of the image in your show…

RP: The repetition echoes the daily, often mindless, replication of domestic chores, of spin cycles. Also, I work from photographs. Using the same reference image many times, for me, leads to an emotional remove.

MS: Although the images operate in twos and threes, there isn’t a sense of you attempting to develop a narrative arc. What was your intention with the grouped images?

RP: You’re correct: there is no narrative arc, despite the sometimes comic book feel of the prints. They are the same image once more, like an instant replaying itself. Working in series makes sense to me. I am able to push the image, coming back to it again and again; re-seeing it, re-imagining it. Working in my tiny home studio daily this practice mirrors the repetitive nature of domesticity. It is also what keeps me sane. It is an escape from the mundane. I make decisions up front, selecting reference images, then working and reworking them becomes a meditation. Formally, the process of making monotypes lends itself to multiples, which engages me.

MS: Sometimes, within a group of images, the one will be developed monochromatically, while the other has colour worked into its details. This happens in the pair How beautiful are these days I and III. What is your sense of the function of the colour?

RP:  The use of non-naturalistic colour enables a shift so that the image (highly-charged and full of meaning) can move away from the image before our eyes and become metaphorical. But again, it couldn’t be simply about the provocative beauty of colour for me. It was important to keep hold of the scariness of the cloud depicted. Although I very often work in blacks/greys, colour is key, I love colour. I love using unexpected combinations and love how that changes a colour I may not necessarily like into one I do. In this body of work Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcuts influenced me. Ukiyo-e translates as ‘Floating world’. The idea that everything in this world, including the Earth itself, is transitory is an underlying theme in my work.

MS: Your use of the title The sleep of reason produces monsters, a reference to the work of the same title by Goya, suggests a socio-political stance creeping in. Is this accurate?

RP: Yes, and there is irony in the title. My interest in neuroscience led me to some fascinating stories of people with brain damage. Some of these people had sustained injury to their frontal lobes. The damage, surprisingly, left them intellectually unimpaired, but their personalities were drastically altered. They were all unable to anticipate the future, they were obstinate, irresponsible, indulged in profanities, were devoid of emotions and deliberated endlessly on even the most routine tasks and irrelevant details, making them incapable of functioning normally in society. So contrary to the wisdom of Plato, Descartes, Kant, Freud, and civilisation as a whole, emotions are crucial to decision making. Reason can’t do it alone.

Ever since the Ancient Greeks, rationality has defined what it is to be human. Society held, or still holds, the belief that our ability to reason, located in our prefrontal cortex, is what sets us apart from animals. And being emotional is a derisive state, one often associated with woman. This has always bothered me as I find that very often it is on an emotional level that I make decisions. Decisions made in the heat of the moment, because it feels right and not because I’ve applied logic and deliberate thought to a scenario. In truth, the age-old belief that Apollonian logic as opposed to Dionysian emotion is king is false. The problem I have with this idea is the still-held belief that atrocities happen when reason sleeps.

MS: The large oil painting Spin Cycle, one of two that seem to anchor the show, seems intentionally anomalous: the cloud in it seems more like a Highveld thunderstorm cloud that a nuke cloud.

RP: It is, and the tension is still there. There is something menacing about this cloud. It is not a Muybridge cloud and is painted from a cloud I photographed. But I had Muybridge in mind when I took the photo and made the painting. I like that it is a Highveld cloud, one that was floating above me…