Max McLaughlin

A Neutral Inferno: In Conversation with Max McLaughlin

For the seventh and final part of our In Conversation series, our England correspondent ventured to London to visit an artist who makes ‘cutting-edge’ look like a wet box. Max McLaughlin’s work – vicious, sublunary, neo-redemptory – remains tragically under-understood. P J Langley set about putting things right.

The first thing: fire. Huge red tendrils of the stuff, churning through the undergrowth. There are paintings strewn amongst the blazing residua, their canvas skins curl into brittle, scintillant black wings. It's a metaphor for this meeting – an unhinged, cathartic, dystopian dialogue between the artist and his vision. For here lies the crucible where the ego and the dead-weights of ‘fact’ converge. Between the delimiting criteria of a social identity and the primal desire for growth amidst chaos, the nascent self reconstitutes itself over and over and over, in a sickening headlong tumble. And there is only one answer to this need, one necessary dialectic: to burn.
I am on Hackney Marshes with the artist Max McLaughlin. We are staring into a bonfire of the young painter's past 3 months' worth of work. Last night – which rapidly became this morning – we were in a cutting-edge hypno-liberal dive bar in Hoxton, sipping on extortionate weissbier and generally ensconcing ourselves amidst the amiable nonsense. Girls with three-storey haircuts tottered past. Boys with shrink-wrapped legs stumbled through the throng like wounded foals. The neon-frazzled air was ripe with chattered rumour, with banal prophecy and hype-induced epiphanies. And yet, for this emerging artist, this hub of happenings was as dead loss, inessential to the point of obsolescence.
The doors of perception were duly cleansed and, with two monosyllables, the order was given that eventually led us to the inferno in the field: ‘Let's go.’
And we did.

Tube rides followed, heading I knew not where. We were nonsensical telegrams shooting across the metropolis. We were misfires, anomalies written a language coded beyond meaning, crashing into an unwatched inbox. We were junk mail. And yet - undeniably, I felt - we were alive.
‘Where are you taking us?’ I enquired, somewhat bewildered by my interviewee's esoteric navigating skills. We had made our way from Old Street all the way to Piccadilly then, blinded by the neon, plunged back down into dark embrace of London's subterrannea, the only place we could breathe. Now we were rattling down the northern line towards Stockwell because, Max told me with a maniacal grin contorting his features, he had ‘had an idea’ that involved his studio space. An instillation, perhaps? An innocuous night in watching a dvd? A toxifying drinking session? Or, I wondered, nothing so much as showing me a painting-in-progress?
I had no way of fathoming out the man's intentions. He simply sat, snuggly wrapped in his military-style black coat, and communicated in a fashion that resonates with his work: economy and darkness.
‘Look,’ he said as we neared Waterloo, pointing out a woman wearing a black bin bag as an anorak and reading a dog-eared volume of Sherlock Holmes. I looked. But I did not see.
‘What about her?’ I whispered, convinced that I had missed something –
something vital.
‘Her head is an axe,’ came the indecipherable reply.
I was Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole.

*

McLaughlin's studio space is visceral. It is pared down to the point of asceticism: the brutalist concrete floor, the faux-abattoir strip lighting, the scattered oddments of junk all suggest the workings of a mind that negates facades, ever excavating beneath the surface image. The space, I am informed, is a former sausage factory which, in a macabre past life, was shut down during the Second World War when it was discovered that portions of human meat had been slipped into the sausages by owners desperate to cope with soaring demand in the ration-tightened (and corpse-glutted) times.
‘They were just making use of the materials to hand,’ says the artist wryly. ‘Something about the recycling of the flesh, disguised - and thus consumed as pig, yet in reality human, reminds me of that ancient word: metempsychosis. The transmigration of souls, from one state into another, across unseen plains. As meat enters and nourishes the body, a transformation takes place. Such can be the significance of a sausage. Those men weren't factory managers - they were artists.’
We remain standing on the threshold of the studio. The air is ice-cold even inside, although deeper into the cavernous space I notice a feeble little electric heater has been left on. Its red wires pulsate desperately against the chill and I, my consciousness dwarfed by the brute presence of the place, find myself empathizing.
McLaughlin leads the way towards an overturned fridge in lieu of a table, upon which is placed a mannequin wearing a rubber gorilla mask and, half-buried beneath reams and reams of sketches, a laptop computer attached by wires to a number of satellite machines. We sit down on upturned crates, and I notice that the floor is splattered with what can only be blood.
A number of wide canvasses are placed at random intervals across the bare floor, their dark surfaces and dream-logic architectures like windows on to an alternate reality. Some are inhabited by animal forms, others simply exist in themselves. I am moved almost to tears.
‘Drink?’ offers the artist. He has procured a bottle of Laphroaig from God-knows-where, like the archetypical magician with his startled rabbit, and proceeds to up-end two absurd measures into enamel mugs that smell suspiciously like turps.
‘Thanks,’ I mutter as the caustic spirits burn down my throat.
This primal ritual over, this perverse Eucharist complete, I find myself wondering again why it is we are here. Our journey appears to have been motiveless, instinctive, inevitable - a knee-jerk against the hammer blows of the city's proliferating absurdities. Nothing quite makes sense, but it is unfolding nonetheless.
I think perhaps it is time to ‘interview’ the guy.

*

artFUCH: One thing that strikes me about your work, time and time again, is its insistence on the numinous - the inexpugnable trace of the spiritual other. And yet you perceive spaces as such sharply delineated forms, almost as if they were themselves the thing – why is that?

Max McLaughlin: I'll begin by saying this: I paint because I must. Painting is not painting for me - it is not a vocation, an activity. It is life. It is breathing. Sitting here, talking to you now, I am dead. I'm not even here. There is no point in this dialogue, since one half of the equation is absent. It is as simple or as complex as that. What you seem to be getting at in your question is this idea of the ghost: the wreckage of the form which nonetheless exerts a presence, a reality beyond the visual. Am I right?

aF: Precisely.

MM: For me this is the only truth, and this is how I would explain the embodied voice which talks to you now: as a trace of a shadow of a memory of an image, which is itself a painting of a drawing. This mug - see. You think it is a mug, yes? No. It is a hopeless void, a chasm of modalities. I paint what I see, and what I see layered voids fanning out beneath the cunning deceptions of sight. If I were to paint you now I would paint an apple, rotting on the end of a pole. You are not real. You have no clothes, no violence.

aF: You can't conflate clothing with the impulse to destruction!

MM: And yet I just have, and this is my point. For many, the conflation of the inanimate and the destructive is fallacious, a misnoma. But what are bombs before they explode? They are sculptural centres of authority, poised between composure and dissolution. I percieve all objects in this manner. The most robust heathen can become undermined by the menace of a toothbrush.

aF: And what might this have to do, then, with your discursive image-making practices? It has been said of your work that they are ‘non-paintings’, that they even ‘de-paint themselves’. Lucier DeGerrau noted that in your work ’the image, when 'transpainted', is birthed in a broken water of nothingness’ due to its previous life as a ‘digitalized alter-ego’. And yet it is defiantly manifest, not least because one can touch it, one can apprehend its surfaces in the usual way. Is this the conflict you speak of?

MM: In a crude sense, yes. But you have missed the point. There are many more vectors to explore here, many avenues of signification branching out from the central nerve-centre of enquiry. To paint, I must breathe negation. I must converse with black depths, tumbling vistas, unstable cores. It does not occur to me that the thing in itself must be that which is translated, since to understand these objects one must first disengage the faculties which ascribe neutrality to the viscera. I am always an engaged presence, with tentacles of perception which bind me bodily to the presence of the non-existent image. This image is like a pack of dogs, and I am the rotting corpse in the snow-bounded woods. I am hunted by my work. It consumes me, tears me limb from limb, each and every day.

aF: Tell me – do you believe in the soul?

MM: The soul is the space between us and meat. So yes, but in your sense – no.

*

Here the interview was interrupted. For no reason I could formulate (the resurgence of some repressed memory volcanically bodying forth? a satiric rendering of the inner savage?) McLaughlin placed his fists under his chair, stood up like some totemic warrior and threw the crass furniture in a spiteful arc across the room. It landed in a tumble, splintering sideways in a vile heap, dead. The look on McLaughlin’s face after this violent poetry was like heat – I could feel its pressure.
‘Arrrrgghhh!’
What was this? What was this inchoate language, this cryptic utterance? As rapid as a magnesium flare, as terrifying as a thunderstorm – these analogies raced through my overwhelmed cranium. McLaughlin, his arms skewered on the cold air, trembled as if withholding some magnificent force. His face was creased, his mind heaving.
‘Paint,’ I heard him gasp. ‘Must… paint.’
And then he was gone – sprinting, fully half-way across the studio before my consciousness had even blinked.
‘Aaarrghch!’
Another anguished cry. He launched himself at a red door set in to the breeze-block walls, tearing at it with limbs, teeth, excoriating rage. I felt the tremors underfoot. Unable to sustain the attack, the door collapsed, its guts spilling out on to the floor. Paint – hundreds of tubes of the stuff. Brushes, turps, newspaper cuttings, cardboard masks – an artistic mini-deluge, a proto-landslide of creative utensils. Suddenly his coat lay torn open like a chocolate wrapper on the floor, his chest bare. He knelt amongst the broken wave of paints, trembling, channeling some condensed voltage of muse-lighting, art-vitality. A moment of calm. The artist’s body was like the bombs he spoke of – an explosion waiting to happen, barely restrained by its own contours: the future’s dissociation written into the lineaments of the now. And then I saw it – the red oils, smeared like sacrificial blood all over his chest and back. He turned, his face a crimson mask. He has been reborn, I thought.
The next few hours flooded past like a dream. Vague, spectral remembrances of the artist flailing himself at the canvas, attacking it with every limb, every emotion, every idea the micro-galaxy of his mind could summon. A flurry of brushes, a convergence of angles, a solvent humidity in the air: these are the key impressions. I felt almost as though the fabric of reality were thinning down, mixing with turps, growing threadbare as new transcendent plains were touched upon, not seen so much as intuited through the image. I drank a lot, whisky after whisky, and watched the work reveal itself slowly like some rectangular beast emerging from the mist.
What now?
A sense of resurfacing, of breath, of reclaimed solidity. The work was not finished, but it had begun. A swathe of darkness, x-ray remnants of forestry, quenched vistas of convoluted space, a lone bird frozen in the ether. The image, curiously, was everything that its construction was not: restrained, lucid, melancholic. It was a marvel to behold.
‘Shall we go?’
Apart from the remnant streaks of red across his face, McLaughlin looked exactly as he had before his maddened episode with the canvas, almost as if it had never even happened.
‘Go where?’ I asked, rather feebly. I’d been knocked sideways by the work, by the whisky.
‘I need to cleanse myself,’ he said. ‘I need… to burn.’
He had a van outside, and I helped him pile in canvas after canvas. What could he mean, to burn? What lexicon was he adopting here? I sensed a plan, something new unfolding, but I was not privy to the reality of its culmination. The foundry that awaited us on the heath in the pale dawn – this was not on my mind, not even slightly. We piled in the work: scraps, fragments, sketches, harried charcoal smears, larger works, fully developed canvas panels. The back of the van was loaded and again I thought, bomb. McLaughlin put the whisky bottle to his lips and in a series of shuddering gulps swallowed almost a quarter of the bottle. With swaying, stuttering steps, his keys chattering in his grasp, he clambered in.
To the drivers seat, naturally.

*

We are driving now, heading north along dingbat roadways, extrapolated networks. The night’s darkness is a filter on reality. Familiar spaces delve and quest. Lights globe and strobe in the blank gloom. In the east the dawn seeps upwards like a liquid curtain.
Pulling on to the arterial main road, we pass silently into a land dominated over by the city's glass and chrome superstructures, those half-alive grids of steel and empty floodlit office spaces rising past, looming like cold shoulders as the van speeds by. The night is absolute. It breathes. Electricity illuminates its veins, hollows out the air into a flickering slide show of after-images. Brake lights, road signs, open doorways and cavernous alleys - we are hell-bent in a godless landscape. Drunken, veering, strangely cubist: Mclaughlin's driving leaves a lot to be desired.
I pull down my window and the wind rushes in, sizzling with a thousand flakes of rain. I am past wondering where we are, where we are going, what time it is. All desire to place myself has dissolved - a curious suspension. London's imagery floods past and I submit to it, freely and equably, no matter its horrors. We cross the river at some point, that serpentine curve of ruffled pewter. Drunks clatter on heels, vomiting freely over the pavements. Maintenance men in fluorescent waistcoats lumber to work, making the world go round. Everything is laid out as it should be – and yet this van, this perch, gives a new perspective on it all. Humanity flickers past, in and out of the light of our perception, and is changed.
Eventually we arrive at our destination. This end point, this new beginning. We park and, luckily (was it luck, or fate?), there is an abandoned shopping trolley a few feet away beside the curb, its chrome lattice drifting with plastic bags. It looks so helpless that I feel like singing to it, but Max has a better idea: already he is loading it with canvases. Silently, I follow. His expression is glazed, grim, set in stone. Some inner storm is gathering and I, extraneous to this grim spectacle, can only observe those outward signs that make up the image of a man. Like hieroglyphics on a cave wall, his indecipherable expressions are symbols, the meanings of which can only be guessed at.
Already the dawn has broken, its hesitant light summoning forms from the shadows. The sky is like white noise: buzzing, swarming, pixilated. Like nomadic wanderers, McLaughlin and I are loaded down with wares. A significant portion of the artist’s recent body of work is carried, slung, pushed, kicked across the grass. No one is around, except for a distant figure: a man in dark clothing, walking his squat dog from tree to silhouetted tree.
McLaughlin chooses a spot at random and flings the first armful down like a gauntlet.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask.
He laughs, coldly.
And then I understand.
‘But… you can’t do this! This work – it’s all valid, it’s all superb! The symmetry, the lineage, the sheer newness of the pieces… you can not destroy them so wantonly!’
But McLaughlin is already busy adding to the mound, piling layer upon layer on this collapsed pyramid of images.
‘Why not? Why can’t I? This is the ultimate manifestation of the brush, the final utterance of paint. Images thrive across the eye like bacterium in a petri dish. They are a virus, paintings festering wounds. So to ashes, all of it. The long slow litany of images, fading into the mire of history. Expression, artistry – these are weapons against the encroaching menace of unthinking matter! If we do not cast a light – a violent, destructive, cleansing light – then the dark will surely drown us all.’
The outburst silences me. Without complaint I watch as the artist lowers himself to one knee, removes a small knife and begins to take shavings from a twig which he found by the side of the road. He looks up at me, frowning in concentration. ‘Ray Mears,’ he says, simply. As soon he has built up a little ball of shavings, he flicks open a lighter and ignites its core. He blows on it gently, whispering, and I wonder how such self-destruction can begin with so small, so tender a preparation.
The fire is slow to catch at first. Smoke barely rises. But then the charcoal sketches, scrawled across salvaged paper, ignite. It is too late for me to save it now – this work will burn, and in so doing will complete some cycle that I can only guess the significance of. As the fire spreads, branching out to claim its empire, I begin to feel a strange liberation rise within me. The illumination is violent, alienating, pure. I see beautiful works cleansed to nothingness, released from their mortality by embracing the void with which their existence is underscored.
‘What are you bringing to this mess?’ McLaughlin asks.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your presence here, your sacrifice. What is its purpose? To observe, to record? No! You must become a symbol. You must confront the centre of the blaze.’
‘But how can I do what you ask?’
‘You must answer that yourself. You must liberate yourself, freely, begin again. Start at the end. Burn, burn, burn. You cannot simply be, you must do. Ask yourself, what is it I am here for?’
‘I have no art, no drawings or paintings… what can I do?’
‘Do not question the what or the why. Act blindly.’
Feverishly I think what I can sacrifice to the blaze. The bonfire is raging now – it churns, burning like the core of some barely held-together machine. It redefines its surroundings, instilling urgency in every thought that rushes through my brain. Think, think… And then I have the answer, and it is disarmingly simple: my wallet, that stone around my neck, that dead weight about my ankles. It’s so necessary, so integral, that it’s a marvel I never realized how useless it was until now. My money, my passport, my credit cards – I begin to grasp what McLaughlin is saying. It’s all a game, and it ends in fire.
‘My wallet,’ I cry, fidgeting in my jeans.
‘Yes,’ growls the artist. ‘You are beginning to believe!’
A moment’s hesitation, and then it is gone. Almost in slow motion, the leather wallet spasms in the air as it falls, a sheaf of paper money flapping out in the breeze and landing in the blaze, my passport, my identity, joining the destructive fusion of fire and ash.
These few moments are like flying.
As the dawn rises about us and London’s denizens dozily awaken, we watch the blaze in silence. McLaughlin had once again magicked the whisky bottle out of nowhere and lazily swigs, as do I. The oil paint bubbles, the pinewood frames char and collapse. Eventually, the fire dies out of its own volition. How many people in this city have witnessed such transformations tonight?
The spectacle over, the cycle complete, we walk back slowly to the van. The odd early riser jogging past regards us with suspicion as we leave the smoking remains behind us, like two survivors emerging from the smoldering wreckage. I let their gazes scour me, for they understand so little of what took place.
Beside the van once more, I realize McLaughlin has been pushing the trolley. He loads it in to the back of the van.
‘Why are you taking that?’ I ask
‘Sometimes, you just get a feeling.’
I nod.
McLaughlin climbs in to the driver’s seat again and I open the door, wondering if this really is the end of the journey. Then, as I am about to step in, he lifts his finger at me, a small gesture – yet one that says so much.
‘No,’ he says. ‘What you have done just now, it changes you. You must find your own way home. It would be wrong of me to drive you.’
These words make complete sense, and it strikes me suddenly that this is how it was going to end all along. Again I nod, shut the door and, for some reason, salute.
Under the trees, swaying now in the early light, I watch the white van swerve away and in a rev of engine disappear. Walletless, sleepless, lost – I am shorter of many things this morning than I was at the beginning of the night. But my eyes have been opened, irrevocably. I have absolutely no money to get home, and I do not really know where I am, but my world has been altered by this fire on the heath.
And that is a gift for which such a price seems very small indeed.

Words By Patrick J Langley (BBC - ArtFuch- King Ludds Revenge)
Photograph by John
Illustration by Gustav

http://a846.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/89/l_a4d64e3fc40602bf1d911f4953b3956d.gif

This post is going to be about music.

Firstly, this is 'Fallow Duusk!' by RedBoxRecorder. He chose a couple of my images to accompany his FREE release on the Netlabel 'Acroplane' get it now by clicking here.

A couple of reviews:

"The debut album from Red Box Recorder makes a statement of intent. Setting his sights on nothing less than world domination and political hegemony, this London-based producer uses the medium of wonky electronica to indoctrinate the masses. Ranging from ravetastic workouts to meditative soundscapes, and embracing everything in between, this is music designed to surprise, delight and induce total brain meltdown – for free!"

- Courtesy of Acroplane Recordings

"The opening track, "Rusty Craver" drifts in with twinkling tones which create an atmosphere reminiscent of many spooky soundtracks. To this are added resonant low end synths and stuttering drum patterns which break down and build up again with additional modulating synths showcasing an approach to arrangement lacking in many dancefloor orientated electronic music LPs.

Track two, "Lodestone Resonatrrr" features waves of noise and squirting acidic notes which give way to clean pizzicato; all backed up with bouncing rhythmns. Most of the tracks feature this diverse array of tones; mixing of the harsh with the mellow, building dense blocks of throbbing sound and then sculpting holes in them to reveal subtle sonic details that reward repeated listens.

"Tyne & Wear" is a departure from the above, it's a gentle, evocative piece. It uses no percussion, it's slowly morphing notes could easily be the theme to drifting along a calm but powerful river at night.

There are a number of tracks which would undoubtedly cause a bit of havoc after-hours. "Hoovers in the Barn", is a prime example; it's groove is strong, held together by an oldskool breakbeat, parping hoover synths, nagging arpeggiated blips and dark reverb saturated yelps. The magic of this track is in the choice of wacked out synths used to bridge each section.

All in all this is unlikely to threaten the public over the airwaves unless radio DJs decide to dump the safe playlists and indulge in some brave, pro-underground playlists, which is a shame as this is a high-quality collection that impresses on the first listen and continues to get better with each replay.

Take the time to download it and listen. You won't tell me I'm wrong."

- Barry Cullen (www.earlabs.org) 9/22/2008
Album Rating : 7.7/10