Julie Mehretu: Politicized Landscapes

[Julie Mehretu: Politicized Landscapes] There is no such thing as just "landscape". The actual landscape is politicized through the events that take place on it. And I don't think it's possible for me, in general, to ever think about the American landscape without thinking about the colonial history-- and the colonial violence-- of that narrative. The abolitionist movement. The Civil War. The move towards emancipation. All of these social dynamics that are part of that narrative, we don't really talk about in regards to American landscape paintings. And so, what does it mean to paint a landscape and try and be an artist in this political moment? The color in these paintings really came out of blurred photographs that were embedded inside of the underpaintings. The sirens and the flames of race riots was a way to embed the paintings with DNA so that I could respond from a deeper place. --I'm going to go upstairs and take a look. --Yeah, I'm excited! [LAUGHS] Marian Goodman contacted me, telling me that SFMOMA was interested in doing this commission before the new museum opened. I went several times to San Francisco to visit the museum. I was there, staring at this very cavernous, open space-- at these two walls. And I started to think about the national parks and the representations of American landscape painting. And, specifically, when I came back, I kept thinking about the Hudson River Valley School painters, like Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, Bierstadt-- because they really encapsulate that idea of going westward. I started to layer the blurred color images into these historic landscape paintings. Just prior to emancipation, Native Americans of the Sierras and the western frontiers were completely annihilated by this expansionist project. What was interesting was that aspect of both annihilation and then preservation shortly after can exist on the same geographic landscape. San Francisco then, as a site, became important because that was this destiny of going out west. [Jason Moran, composer and pianist] --[MEHRETU] How are you doing? Jason Moran wrote me after seeing some paintings and he talked about them as a score. And I was super interested in that. And so we started working together here in a very, very loose and open way. It's kind of an amazing thing to paint in a church. Everything kind of reverberates back into here, energy-wise-- consciousness-wise-- and everything that has taken place this year in my personal life, with my children, with what has happened politically. All of that is immersed in these paintings. [Electric piano plays] All of these brutal killings of Black people in this country-- and the Black body. The Trump-Hillary dynamic, it was disgusting to witness. There was something in that language that's visceral. When a person speaks so horrifically towards another being, that's deeply wrenching. The discomfort of being a person living and working in the United States is a place that, I think, these paintings were being made from. [Electric piano plays] [JASON MORAN] Every room defines one tone, and it's like the room tone. It's the tone that makes it resonate. And I started to find some of that in the note A-flat. I started to build around that, and then, every once in a while, look up and see where Julie was in her work. Then slowly, I started to look at my sheet of paper not as a place that had a start and a finish, but that all of it could be composed on different moments. --I made a little section where you were taking stuff away. [LAUGHS] --I made you a little part that's like, "I'm taking this away." [MEHRETU LAUGHS] [MORAN] America is a country still in the adolescent stage. It doesn't know how to deal with its emotions. [LAUGHS] It doesn't know how to deal with its history. It doesn't want to dig in the ground to know what artifacts are under it. And so, jazz, I always say, has been that form of music that's been the model of letting people know what's happening. It's always been like that. [Electric piano plays] And so we recorded the music because we should document the moment and also share the moment, too. [MEHRETU] I really try to think about painting in terms of the construction or making of an image. Dealing with things that we don't have proper language for. I kind of start to think of them as these visual neologisms. The neologism is there to address when language isn't enough. Through repetition of the mark, there's this desire of trying to invent something. At a certain point, I wanted to bring elements of the underpainting to the surface, so that it further complicated, spatially, how you were seeing these. When you're looking at these paintings, they're not graspable. There are moments where they reference Renaissance Ascension painting, and then other moments that feel digitized. At least for me, they're not something I feel like I can give any kind of articulation of what's happening fully. [Jazz music plays] I love California. There's this grandeur to the coast and the way the coast reaches the ocean. When you're driving through the Bay Area, it's just majestic. [San Francisco Museum of Modern Art] I feel like I have a hundred other paintings I want to make, because I've learned so much in making these. I'm not going to try and take a break or stop working. There's a lot of creative momentum in finishing these paintings. [Clapping and cheering] I have a lot of ideas that I want to investigate and I'm excited about that.