Hernán Bas

M. Coetzee: Hernan’s work presents some real risks for me. I’d prefer that he not be conscripted as a gay artist; I remember you expressing similar reservations. I see his work as collapsing the romantic and the conceptual, picking up after Bas Jan Ader’s work.

M. Clintberg: I am glad you introduce the conceptual in your first thought. Of course, one can focus on the reference of the decadent, the queer aesthetic, and the literary directness. My interest in Hernan’s work has always lain in the concept. So how can these small narrative paintings and drawings even be considered conceptual?

M. Coetzee: For me, the work starts off by playing within schematic conventions: genre, and the basic tools of narrativity. He begins with ‘isolation’ for example, and then digs into the forms that are used to convey that sentiment in contemporary romance literature, and romantic literature of the 18th century. It’s an interrogation of storytelling.

M. Clintberg: Well, I hope you mean ‘isolation’ as a choice—to represent the singular struggle of modern man, for example—and not an imposition. If his was imposed isolation, that would infer victimization, which would just re-entrench prejudice. But to get back to the conceptual, I have always been fascinated with the way artists have managed to get away with creating a critique of the status quo. From Goya to Kentridge, we see how effective artists are at this. More related to Hernan’s work, I think of artists who managed to express ideas or desires through their work that would have clearly offended the morality or even the law of their time. Writers like Oscar Wilde, painters like Thomas Eakins and Henry Scott Tuke, and photographers like Wilhelm von Gloeden, managed to do this while largely staying out of jail. But with the acceptability now of most subject matter, not only in art but also in popular media, what happens to that language of inference, what you call schematic conventions? So for me, Hernan’s work is not so much concerned with the romantic, but with a nostalgia for a lost language, of the way ideas could be conveyed within that period in a subversive way. Something that seems so sentimental can convey a desire abhorrent to the moral structure of the time. Is there a nostalgia for a language that no longer serves a purpose? Is there an attempt to preserve a language that effectively empowered the isolated?

M. Coetzee: Yes, absolutely. The decision to be isolated and solitary, rather than being ostracized, is what’s important here. What becomes dangerous is an aesthetic that too greatly glorifies this victimhood—and I don’t see Hernan’s work doing that—but it does seem to be a homage to a code that’s been replaced. I’d like to address, too, how adolescence figures into this.

M. Clintberg: Well, many of his references are mystery and adventure novels aimed at an adolescent demographic, but I think it goes deeper. I have always been moved and titillated by his direct acknowledgement of the skinny kid, or twink, as desirable— what might be construed as mere representation of a pre- pubescent form, is actually a social construct, an objectified male body type. I also think about sexual awakening at a certain age and how that can be bound into romantic gestures, and how identity is formed through self-awareness. Tell me your thoughts. How do you feel adolescence features in his work?

M. Coetzee: I’m interested in his display of youth as mystery, both wondrous and terrifying, rather than a situation founded on desire, but I definitely acknowledge that his work also presents an ideal of this waifish, delicate and easily bruised youth. I think, too, that these youths are in intimate, close relationships, but not always ones that should be construed as sexual, but instead can be looked at as fraternal. His video Fragile Moments speaks of this fragile moment of close interaction between young men as they swim together playfully, that is more than collegial, but not erotic whatsoever, for me.

M. Clintberg: Let’s change the subject. We have spoken about literary references, but we should still discuss Hernan’s literal or text usage. He goes to great pains to title each work with loaded references to mythology, stories, etc. He has been very clear in creating bodies of work with grandiose titles, and each piece within the body of work is titled separately. For me this creates a linear narrative, a chronology not unlike the disputed linear viewing of art by so many historians.

M. Coetzee: That offers some endgame! Can you expand what the consequences of that lineage would be? He does turn the titles on a pivot, sometimes making them satirical, as with The Immaculate Lactation of Saint Bernard. But then a title like Burning Up For Your Love seems more likely to be the title of some eccentric Swedish pop ballad. M. Clintberg: Well, linear views do create not only an endgame but also some very literal meanings, no pun intended. They might create a too-defined reading.

M. Coetzee: They also become totally flat, and without any mass. This might present some big problems, true. It’s an edge that the work could plummet into. The religious and mythic references, particularly, seem poised on the cusp, and I’m not sure that wit or irony set up any kind of hermetic barrier to prevent what you caution against. Critique by parody—which his work is not, as far as I’m concerned—can be reappropriated and recycled by the normative system so quickly, that it’s near impossible for that kind of practice to carry much weight in the long run. Critique by pastiche—which, I think, his work might be—gets much more wooly and tricky to pin down. This goes back to our earlier point about Wilde, et al., negotiating room to be enfants terribles but also society darlings.

M. Clintberg: So how do you think Hernan’s work fits into the dialogue about painting now— I mean, besides the obvious relation to Karen Kilimnik and Elizabeth Peyton?

M. Coetzee: Well, the grand gestures of the medium of painting, such as the artist as social engineer/transformative agent, have rarely been less apparent in the history of painting than they are right now. Whether this is for the best is another conversation. There has been such a return to the subjective and diaristic possibilities of the medium, and Hernan’s work could no doubt be read as a part of this. I’m prone to think about his work as a play with repertoire—not with the aim of virtuosity in terms of paint handling—but in the way he negotiates, by turns and often in one work, with idiomatic language, trash fiction, and mythologies. I detect in his work something of the spirit of Neoclassicism and its reorientation of earlier forms.

M. Clintberg: Bound in the works’ romantic storytelling, art historical references, grand gesture and melding of the conceptual, I still feel humanity. Humanism. Real stories told of real boys, with deeply held feelings. An artist expressing his experience, his history, his desires, his world, and his place in that world right now—both as artist and individual.

Originally from South Africa, Mark Coetzee has been the director of the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, Florida, since 2000.
Independent curator, writer, and artist, Mark Clintberg was Associate Curator at the Art Gallery of Calgary from 2002 to 2003. He is currently completing his master’s degree in Art History at Concordia University, in Montreal, Canada.