Craig Burnett: At last year’s Venice Biennale, at the painting show in the Museo Correr, I was standing next to The Riches of the Poor (2003) and someone behind me said, ‘Ahhh, Glenn Brown! Bellissimo!’ How would you respond to someone calling one of your paintings beautiful?

Glenn Brown: I’m having a sort of ongoing conversation with somebody about how I could make my paintings more ugly. I always pick ugly subject matter and repellent colours – the colour of gone-off meat or decaying matter. But every time they see a new painting they say, ‘No, it’s still beautiful, it’s still gorgeous’, and ‘I would quite like to eat it’. I’m fully aware of that contradiction – between the beautiful and the ugly – and I like it. I like something to be both figurative and abstract, looking dead but still alive, being of ambiguous sex. I like it when the viewer isn’t able to put it into a genre, as well.

CB: What do you mean by genre – a tradition, such as expressionism, or portrait, still life and so on?

GB: Well, the paintings done in the past two years are mostly portraits. But, yes, in terms of how the painting has been painted. Am I an absolutely anally-retentive painter with no sense of freedom or expression, or are they actually quite expressive and wild paintings? I want to get somewhere between those two points – expression and whatever the opposite of expression is… boredom?





CB: America (2004), a painting that was in your recent show at Gagosian, New York, brought to mind Henri Bergson’s quip about ‘how profound is the comic element in the over-romantic, Utopian bent of mind’. Is there an element of parody in that painting?

GB: It comes from Fragonard, but I had in mind the Powell and Pressburger film, A Matter of Life and Death (1946). It’s partially how the film deals with colour and black and white, and how my painting deals with colour in a rather black and white way, if that makes sense. For instance, the book is bright red while the rest of the painting is just a monochrome blue. In the original Fragonard painting the figure is looking across, presumably to another figure in the gallery; whereas I took the painting and as well as elongating it, giving it El Greco’s sense of proportions as if the figure is being drawn up to heaven, I tilted the figure and changed the eyes to make it look as if the figure is looking up. In the Fragonard painting the book doesn’t have very much importance – it’s meant to be a big folder with drawings in it, with a loose, floppy cover. I’ve turned it into a book and given it a bright red cover. It was meant to be something important – rules, regulations or just a great book. So it was about the false sense of pomposity that the figure has, looking to heaven holding a great, red book.

CB: It’s hard not to think of American politics and George W. Bush, et al.

GB: Well, yes, I certainly had in mind the fact that America makes the rules for the rest of the world and sees them as divine, and uses religion to justify its capitalist decisions. And I thought the painting was the best way for me to comment on that, especially since it was made to be shown in New York during the time of the war in Iraq, and I wanted to make a comic point because I didn’t know how else to deal with it. I had to acknowledge the fact that I was making this painting for a show that was in a gallery on Madison Avenue, which is a ridiculous contradiction. The enormous cost of the products and the décor of some of the shops compares fantastically with the road itself, which is full of potholes and broken manhole covers. So it seems to me a good example of a society in which the structure of the society doesn’t matter at all – it’s all rotten and falling to bits, but the veneer is gorgeous and lovely. So I wanted to make some sort of comment, and that’s why that painting got called ‘America’.

CB: I think Death Disco (2004), which was also in the Gagosian show, is quite funny, and allowed me to look back at some of your earlier work and see the humour in it.

GB: Can I ask you why you think it’s funny?

CB: The way the figure looks at the viewer, the limpness of the vegetation, the way you take a Rembrandt and make it look as if it were melting in a Mexican sun. Why, is that painting not particularly funny to you?

GB: No, I was just intrigued, because you don’t often get people to make comments like that. People are usually very reticent about what they see. They think it’s very personal, even though it’s not meant to be; it’s meant to have a sort of generic meaning for everybody. But, ah, humour. Some of my favourite painters, in fact most of my favourite painters, are very slapstick, very funny. Picasso, especially. Most of his work is sexual and vulgar – and ridiculous. The points to which he stretched Cubism and the portrait is meant to be a funny game about how bizarre he could make the human head. When someone has their nose below their mouth and one eye at the back of their head, it is funny. Similarly, an artist like George Condo has taken up the portrait and Picasso’s legacy, and played around with art history in straightforwardly comic ways. And they were two huge, important examples to me. I wanted to make art with a similar sense of black humour. I find it enlivening, and you can bring in very contradictory bits of information. I find Dali’s sense of surrealism very funny – the playfulness and the sense of experimentation.

CB: And his persona became sort of comically grotesque.

GB: Oh yes, and his answers whenever he was interviewed were bizarre in the extreme and comic. But I see, especially in portraiture, a history of dark humour. And it goes back even further, to people like Goya, who painted very dark subject matter but treated it in, well, not a lighthearted way, but in a comic or bizarre way. Humour is a way of trying to get to the heart of human emotion, taking on fairly pompous themes, like love, death and sex, and trying to put them in a contemporary painting without seeming ridiculous. The only way to do that, it seems to me, is to use humour. It’s a way of being base and guttural, yet managing to talk about big themes. For instance, in the painting in front of me now…

CB: What’s it called?

GB: It’s probably going to be called International Velvet, which, again, is meant to be funny, because if you know the film that it refers to you would probably laugh rather perplexedly because you wouldn’t know what on earth the relationship was. It’s a film about horses, but here you have this very abstracted painting of a head with a single eye and a rather vulgar looking mouth with a blue flower coming out of it.





CB: And some of Picasso’s Cubist portraits had dots that were both anuses and mouths.

GB: Yes, it’s about the body and all of its parts, and about how sometimes they get mixed up. The painting is actually from a Baselitz that has been altered and pretty much lost in the process. There was once a head that was coming out of a collar but has now been turned into a mouth with a blue flower coming out of it, for no explicable reason. It’s just my world made of paint where everything gets turned upside down and both colour and subject matter become as vulgar as possible. I hope the effect is comic. You’re not supposed to actually laugh at it, but perhaps a wry grin as you try to examine what’s going on and discover little heads and animals that exist within the main head. If you see it as a head at all.

CB: Your painting Dirty (2003), in ‘Breaking God’s Heart’, the show you curated last year, featured a halo above the head. When did you start adding haloes to portraits?

GB: There have only been three: Shallow Deaths (2000), Dirty and The Riches of the Poor.

CB: The halo looks almost more space-age than divine. What led you to add a halo to a portrait?

GB: It’s a beautiful mark to make on a painting. Also, within the brush marks I make there are lots of thin lines, so it’s almost like taking one brushstroke from the painting and making a loop around its head. But it definitely refers to Catholicism and to religious portraits, biblical portraits, anyone deemed worthy of a halo, from the Virgin Mary to Kings and various saints. I like that very simple signifier of saintliness. It still has connotations of purity. And to put it on a figure that is very definitely not pure, or in the case of Dirty, isn’t even a fully formed head. It doesn’t even have an eye, an ear, a mouth or a nose. It’s a mutant human being, or I suppose it’s almost how I feel as a human being, not perfectly formed. Your identity comes and goes and has borrowed bits and it depends on who you’re speaking to. Anyway, to put the halo on, to give that sign of saintliness on something that might break God’s heart because it shouldn’t really exist, in the proper, Catholic sense of the world, is funny.

CB: Are you, in a way, trying to sanctify the incompleteness that you mentioned? When you paint something malformed yet give it a halo you seem to be saying, ‘Look, this is the best we can do’.

GB: The reason it got called Dirty is because of a song by Christina Aguilera, which was in the charts at the time and had a very raunchy video to it.

CB: The one where she’s in a sort of wrestling match?

GB: Yeah, boxing ring and wrestling match, and all sorts goes on. She’s both very sexy in it and very adolescent. She appears very gutsy and violent but also has a sort of innocence to her. She has a lot of things built in to her persona, put across both in the song and video to the song, and I just wanted to get a bit of that into the painting.

CB: A bit of Christina.

GB: Yeah. When she pulls a face, is she beautiful or ugly? I like that. And she’s also rather rounded and buxom, which I wanted to be in the painting as well.

CB: And of course you’ve been using musical references in your paintings for years, from Saturday Night Fever (1992) to Death Disco. Are the musical titles ironic or do they allude to some recent experience, like the Aguilera video?





GB: I’m not trying to be wholly ironic. There is a connection. But I’m fully aware that whenever I make a painting you shouldn’t have to know the song that the title refers to in order to enjoy the title. For instance, one of my sculptures is called The Sound of Music, which is obviously a film with Julie Andrews in it, but I just like the title The Sound of Music, and I wanted people to be able to just look at the sculpture and just think about literally ‘The Sound of Music’. There is a very still object held within this Perspex box, made of oil paint, encrusted and ugly and rather degenerate, and I wanted people to think of any kind of music playing along with this, surrounding it, and that’s what I wanted the title to refer to. If people think of Julie Andrews running across a mountaintop and then look at this ugly, burnt-looking, detestable sculpture, and laugh because of the contradiction, then that is also good. With Death Disco I wanted people to think of the word ‘disco’ and the word ‘death’ and not necessarily have to know the Public Image song that it refers to. In a lot of my paintings I try, in the title, in the use of colour and the combination of background and figure, to perhaps re-present historical portraits in a contemporary setting, as if to say, ‘what would happen if this person were still alive today? Would they cope with contemporary life?’ To try to get at these fundamental human emotions, I suppose. Therefore bringing somebody from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, it seems to me, is an interesting thing to think about in terms of portraiture. It’s what I do when I walk around the National Gallery – I try to contemporise the figures, to animate them, to bring them to life, because I think that’s what the painters wanted me to do. In Death Disco, I wanted the yellowness of the background to be very contemporary, as if caught in the glaring light of an acid disco, something that wouldn’t have existed in Rembrandt’s time.

CB: So if Rembrandt, Velazquez and Fragonard were alive today, who would have the best CD collection?

GB: I think Fragonard would have to be into Morrissey, wouldn’t he? Fragonard! Because I know he liked parties. In fact, he used to have parties in his house where he would do twenty-minute paintings for the invited guests, and they would clap while he painted. I don’t know if music would have been playing at the same time, but his sense of the Rococo could have used some good, gutsy disco.

Craig Burnett is a freelance writer and Assistant Editor of the V&A magazine