An Interview With Jordan McKenzie
Jordan McKenzie is a visual artist based in the UK who has exhibited internationally. He works across a diverse range of media including painting, drawing, text, performance and installation. More recently McKenzie has turned his attention to painting. His paintings are materially and visually promiscuous, employing the traditional materials of paint, canvas and drawn marks, but also things found on the street and non-traditional materials like dog fur to upset the hierarchy of high and low cultural production.
Can you tell us a little bit about you?
I'm an artist living in East London and I also teach on the BA Drawing degree course at Camberwell College of Art. I've been making work for over thirty years and have worked with drawing, performance, installation, film and now painting.
How has your artistic practice changed over time?
I've always enjoyed deliberately putting myself in new and uncomfortable spaces. When drawing was seen as unfashionable in the 90s that's exactly where I placed myself. My performance practice ranged from queer body art through to socially engaged public events. I've now become fascinated by painting and only started making paintings in my fifties. I don't see a huge difference between painting and performance, for me, it's all part of the same trajectory. I'm currently at the Turps Banana Painting School and it's great to hear so many new voices and approaches to this area of practice.
Much of your work features non-traditional materials but what is it about a specific item that you find so fascinating and therefore choose to incorporate into your art?
Can I have two? Holographic card and dog fur. Dogs don't exist in nature, they're completely artificial and man made, just like painting! As for the holographic card, there's something mesmerising and at the same time completely naf about it, a kind of vacuous beauty. These two materials reflect the ways I think about my paintings. They're like somebody who's going to a fancy restaurant but haven't had enough time to get ready. They're trying to look good, but they know their shoes are scuffed and they've spotted a dog hair on their jacket.
What is it about the city and it's busy streets that you find so inspiring?
The provisionality of these spaces. My paintings go through multiple layers, changing radically, being erased, built, erased. It's this kind of energy that I see in urban spaces. Things being on the move, in competition, fighting to exist. These spaces can change from being beautiful to dangerous within seconds. Walking these areas is a similar mode of discovery that I attempt to find in painting.
You use a wide range of media and medium in your work but do you have a favourite?
It's not a medium. The favourite thing in my work is the verb. On my wall I have a list of verbs that the sculptor Richard Serra wrote to help him think about how to make sculpture. They say things like To roll, To compare, To wrap, To cover, To arrange. It's this language of doing words that help me to make paintings. Essentially, painting for me is performative, this is how I marry my experience of performance art onto/into painting.
What are some of the biggest challenges you face as an artist?
Ageism.
Your earliest memory of art?
It's not an earliest one but certainly one of my strongest when I was young. Channel 4, the UK TV network when it first started had a remit to show 'challenging' art. It broadcast a film called The Killing Of Sister George, a film about a dysfunctional lesbian relationship which was broadcast really late at night. I remember creeping down in my pajamas and sitting inches away from the screen with the volume on low so that my parents wouldn't wake up.
Is there one piece or project you are especially proud of?
Although it was extremely stressful to make, I guess it would be a social practice project called Shame Chorus. It was a collaborative project working with the psychotherapist Suzi Orbach, the Freud Museum and The London Gay Men's Chorus (LGMC). Members of the chorus were interviewed by Orbach about experiences of shame that they had felt while growing up gay/queer. These interviews were then given to contemporary composers who turned them into choral works which were then sung by the LGMC.
What is your favourite book or film and why?
A Rebours (against nature) by Joris-Karl Huysmans. It's about an eccentic and reclusive aesthete who loathes 19th Century bourgeois society. He tries to create an entire world of his own creation. The book is a catalogue of his own neurotic aesthetic tastes with hilarious and disturbing musings on religion, painting, literature and aesthetic judgement. It deeply influenced the development of my alter ego that I performed for three years. Monsieur Poo-Pourri was an aristocratic sophisticated gentleman who had mistaken the council estate that he lives in (I live on a council estate in East London) for his country estate. Dressed as a Victorian with a waxed moustache and silver walking stick, he would tour his estate, greeting commoners and riding on a hobby horse. It was a satire on our class ridden society, breeding and notions of 'privilege'.
Are you working on any projects you are particularly excited about?
I'm currently curating a show about painting and collage with Dan Sturgis, painter, curator and Professor in Painting at Camberwell UAL. It's in its fledgling stages but it will be a survey of contemporary painters whose practice involves extending the materiality of their practice through the use of collaged 'non-painterly' materials. We're hoping to present it next year.