Georgina Gratrix' Master Copy can be seen at Whatiftheworld/Gallery until the 27th September.

IM Chat between Robert Sloon and Georgina Gratrix.

Robert: Hi.

Georgina: Hello Robert. Sorry my Gmail chat lags a little at times.

Robert: Cool. I'm a little nervous with interviews, so you'll have to bear with me if this takes a little while to get started.

Georgina: No, its fine. At least we don’t have to mumble and stare into space face to face. By we, I mostly mean me. It’s like on-line dating. I get to stare at Paris Hilton's bosom from here whilst typing. It's like we're tangoing. I may step on your toes quite a bit.

Robert: I have two left feet...

Georgina: Wow, this is fun.

Robert: Your previous work, right back to your University stuff was quite different to Master Copy. There are similar elements, but the new work has made a big move away from the figurative.

Georgina: Yes, it’s shifted from the figurative in the literal sense.

Robert: But not in the figurative sense?

Georgina: But it was also just thinking about figurative work differently. To me the Master Copy stuff is still all mostly figurative. Well, the stripes are figurative [Woman Wallpaper Series] and the friend wheel [Friend Wheel] is still essentially a self-portrait. It’s just not the obvious two eyes and a nose.

Robert: So does that make the more abstract work still quite representative?

Georgina: Yes, I suppose I saw myself trying to learn abstraction in a meaningful way. Well, where it still represents something and has a logic outside of the picture. Part of the work is also about figurative painting, like the Show Me Your Dancing figure. The figure is outgrowing and stepping out the canvas.

Robert: The Show me your Dancing and Show Me your Feeling set could be construed as quite political, at least in the feminist sense of it. There's quite a lot of woman vs. man stuff. Elements of being a woman and a painter seem to be important.

Georgina: Yes, particularly the female [Show Me Your Dancing], which is for me a dialogue with a [Dana] Schutz painting I really admired- 50-foot Queenie, which itself referenced a painting of the same title by Maria Lassnig- A 1950s painting, I think, where this giant naked woman roams over skyscrapers in a King Kong manner. It 's the idea of the naked, not the nude, woman. Big and liberated and quite powerful.

Robert: And the man [Show Me Your Feeling] with silly face disguise genitals.

Georgina: Yes, I did feel a little bad. But the title of the work also references this Japanese magic realism scene from Funky Forest [a film directed by Katsuhito Ishii], where a couple shouted at each other. Her shouting, “Show me your dancing”, him shouting, “Show me your feelings” endlessly. I thought it was quite poignant.

Robert: The opposition between male and female also shows quite strongly in Girl on the Rocks. It's a remake of Henri Rousseau's Boy on the Rocks?

Georgina: Yes.

Robert: Looks like a self-portrait, a girl straddling the world, holding brushes.
Georgina: A painting I suppose which also has that magic realism thing happening. It was intended as a self-portrait. For me the original, compositionally and stuff, just had such a great sort of logic. About being alienated.

Robert: Are you asserting a strong identity as a woman painter? Or being alienated as a woman painter. Is there such a thing as a woman painter? And what's the difference?

Georgina: There is no difference. It just seemed apt to make the boy a girl. A self-portrait, really. Maybe its just more general, about being an artist, being part of the world but also just observing and looking. That's an artist's job essentially: to look at things a little differently. Well, for me. It's about having a different vantage point.

Robert: I'm interested in the way you look and observe. Henri Rousseau had a naive outlook, as a self-taught painter. There are many elements of naiveté in your work too. How much are they intentional stylistic choices?

Georgina: I suppose I recognise the naive elements in my work and I like to think that they are considered. Especially in this body of work. I wanted to mash everything up: ‘good’ painting, ‘bad’ painting, scribbles, dead straight lines. Everything. Almost in one line. Nothing ‘better’ than the other. I think Rousseau made great paintings…not that I've ever seen a real Rousseau painting.

Robert: But he wasn't willfully making ‘bad’ art, or purposefully dabbling in kitsch.

Georgina: No, that's true.

Robert: Do you think you are using a language of naivety to say something else?

Georgina: They were sincere...Oh this does get a little complicated. Well, I suppose it’s the gesture that is seemingly ‘naïve’. The impulse to just make. But for me it’s more of a logic, a way of working. Thinking visually and solving pictures through making pictures, which I think I was trying to say in the monotype diptych, Doodlehead and Mind Map.

Robert: Do you think there is an aspect of, say, an attack on Good Taste through using naivety and kitsch?

Georgina: I suppose the posters and those elements of the work could be viewed in that way. I saw them more as explanatory texts. Key cards.

Robert: But you don't see that as a significant aspect of the show?

Georgina: Yes, stylistically, I suppose. With the drip paintings, Composition (eyes), I was very aware of the cutesy element, but cutesy is different to naïve.

Robert: But they are similar, in a way, they can fit into the same basket of style as kitsch, and amateur. Do you think using these sorts of elements is ironic?

Georgina: Yes, definitely.

Robert: Can this irony coexist with sincerity in painting? Is sincerity important?

Georgina: But I suppose there's a part of me that finds kitsch painting particularly alluring. It's almost the job of kitsch to function like that - to be alluring and repulsive at the same time. I think that's what I struggle with- for me the sincerity in the work is incredibly important but I feel like I’m also aware of the irony- the bad taste- but I’m kind of indifferent. Maybe it's duplicitous. Can one be ironically sincere? I suppose it's more sincere than ironic.

Robert: I guess one can be both. Do you think that's a reflection on the world? Your different vantage point? Life can be both ironic and sincere.

Georgina: Yes, in that way it relates to past work I did on celebrities. For me that's kind of like the ultimate kitsch- banal, trashy, alluring, repulsive and very seductive.

Robert: It ties in strongly with various movements (if you can still say that word) in contemporary painting. There is a lot of Bad is Good stuff. How does your work tie into the bigger narrative?

Georgina: Well, that’s just it I think bad and good are somehow the same.

Robert: In what way?

Georgina: Stella Vine- she makes horrible paintings. But I adore them. It's the amateur naïve thing for me that’s surface. Essentially it's also about successful images and successful images can include very bad painting.

Robert: What makes a successful image?

Georgina: It's difficult to put a formula to it.

Robert: I know that's simplistic question, but what are you looking for?

Georgina: For me, they somehow attract and repel simultaneously. I like painting that does that. Karen Kilimnik does that at times. It's the difference between like Paris Hilton- and say a plainer girl- with some flaws maybe skew teeth. Sometimes the girl with skew teeth is sexier. Paris is just too obvious. Painting that’s too obviously good, it can all just be a bit too obvious.

Robert: How does that tie in to a wider audience's perception of painting? Do you think the public feels the same way? Or are their perceptions of what painting caught up in something else?

Georgina: There are different audiences. Do we mean a layman's understanding of contemporary painting? In South Africa?

Robert: Maybe. Like my mother, as an example.

Georgina: Well, yes, I think perhaps her expectations of painting may be outmoded though I don’t know her. That painting should be pretty or monumental or stoic or grand.

Robert: Well, she has kitsch taste.

Georgina: Painting now can be anything and is just as comfortable being silly, flippant and…well… bad if it feels like it. The contemplative landscape thing, it's the generic idea of what painting should be that I maybe find distasteful and outdated. But it's all things that art itself is quite comfortable with. It just hasn't spread to ... your mother... perhaps yet.

Robert: So do you think the kitsch she likes is different from the kitsch you like? Is there kitsch that is more appropriate? More tasteful? More useful?

Georgina: I think kitsch is a huge landscape in itself. I think maybe the problem lies in first being able to acknowledge and understand something as being kitsch but like it anyway. The problem arises if you aren't able to recognise why something is in fact kitsch.

Robert: What about Rousseau? He couldn't.

Georgina: But he's not now.

Robert: Yes. I suppose it's a much harder world to navigate now.

Georgina: But he made successful images. Aaaah, there's a loop. But at the time his jungle paintings fitted into a whole popular culture thing of the time.

Robert: Does popular culture play the same role in your work? Both repulsive and seductive at the same time? Like the Facebook friend wheel [Friend Wheel]?

Georgina: The Facebook friend wheel doesn't operate for me like that, no. It’s obviously pop cult, but more importantly it’s a readymade figurative abstract, which solved things for me. It’s just line and colour but people. And, yes, something that many people can identify with and relate to and rainbow gushy my little pony colour. And the lines are quite dynamic and almost strobe like which I enjoyed.

Robert: There is quite a love affair with the materiality of paint: Straight lines, chunky impasto, visible brush-marks. How did that work when a load of stuff was made by assistants? Does it make a difference?

Georgina: The impasto was a response to printmaking. Working with assistants was just a logistical necessity, but also it seemed collaborative: finding the right skill to match the idea. I enjoyed having work that was so ‘perfect’ and calculated, something that I find difficult to achieve.

Robert: In the Woman Wallpaper series?

Georgina: Yes, it seemed just both time- and skill-wise to find someone else to execute it.

Robert: Your prints worked like paintings too. Do you see them as prints? Something separate?

Georgina: I see them as being very separate to the paintings. There are very useful boundaries within printmaking. I enjoy the layers, the flatness. Colour does very different things within a print. I was exploring colour and also, well, brushstroke. Maybe, They’re prints about painting. The heartbeats [Heart Beats]print specifically, the big gushy drippy brushstroke one.

Robert: Was it a challenge to work in such a technical medium? Especially working in such close collaboration with a master printer?

Georgina: No, not really a challenge. It was exciting having technical barriers, a framework which doesn’t exist in painting. Like painting can get thick and crusty and hectic, where as a print at the end of the day always looks neat and special somehow.

Robert: Going back to the woman wallpaper series. It’s a series in which you take famous paintings of women, Les Demoiselles, Olympia and a De Kooning piece and translate them into stripes. While they're as funny and ironic as the other work, these particular works seem much more serious. A little more pointed and critical.

Georgina: Yes, they were quite a lot more calculated than the other work. I wanted to make a painting that was completely banal on one level- to be wallpaper- but also incredibly funny and angry a little too. Inane and angry and funny and stripes.

Robert: It's good combo. All these men taking out their anger through painting women. And you just tease them.

Georgina: It's looking at modernist masterpieces - perhaps even the modernist masterpiece. Which happens to be of women. Necrophilia. Communicating with the dead. Tickling them in their graves. It seemed like a fun thing to do. But also serious. Serious and fun.

Robert: Like ironic and sincere?

Georgina: I suppose I like matching the two. Yes, duplicitous, double edged, to get opposites to sit next to one another.

Robert: Do you think most of your work has that necrophiliac element to it? How much of painting is fucking the past?

Georgina: Painting is a loaded medium, but that’s what’s great about it. It’s dead, dying, no one really cares. Po-mo?

Robert: Aarrgh. Po-mo.

Georgina: Haha. Yay. Just had to drop that in. Sorry.

Robert: It's ok. I'm tired now. Do you have any last words?

Georgina: We can end with aaaaaaaaa.