EPISODE ONE NOTE TO SELF

Trompe l ’oeil painting and crime fiction are not obvious bedfellows, but their mutual reliance on method is of great relevance to Lucy McKenzie. She has long shown an inter-est in procedural formalism, be it the conventions of classi-cal painting, or thriller novels assembling around formulaic constructs. Formats  such as these provide the occasion for her to play with structure and depth and use artificiality to her advantage. 

In this first episode, we follow McKenzie’s fascination with style as a kind of simula-tion. Artist Alan Michael joins her to present paintings and photographs based on their new book of short stories, Unlaw-ful Assembly; literary scholar Hope Hodgkins speaks about the self-aestheticizing desire of Muriel Spark’s stylish spinsters; Michael Bracewell writes about artists as characters in their own fiction; and Lucy McKen-zie gives a talk about herself.

·SEP TEMBER 20 –

OCTOBER 20, 2013

Little Bedham HouseFittleworth, West Sussex, UKSeptember 4, 2013

Dear Lucy,

And so suddenly it’s September and the dead heat of August is finally lifting. Here we woke this morning to intent verti-cal rain, awakening in its turn the rich scent of wet earth and dripping leaves on the suddenly fresher air.

September exhilarates—don’t you find? I always liked the beginning of the new school year the best: those first few days of what we still quaintly called The Michaelmas Term—invar-iably hot and sunny—when it seemed that one just had time to glimpse, in the newly scrubbed classrooms, the fading ghosts of the previous year. In his heady foray into literary transvestitism in the early 1940s, writing as Brunette Coleman, the English poet Philip Larkin caught such a mood at the close of his poem,

“The School In August”: “…and even swimming groups can fade, Games mistresses turn grey…”

But exactly…the school in August...the country in this part of West Sussex is pale and gentle, a succession of mild receding perspectives. The light seems soft and somehow eight-eenth century, blowsy above this remote wooded fold, with a view to the North Downs and beyond those, the sea. We are surrounded by the former seats and old schools of British sur-realists and neurotically snob-bish novelists (Evelyn Waugh was at Lancing College, twenty minutes fast driving away) and Larkin himself, holidaying, was inspired to write “An Arundel Tomb” at Chichester Cathedral, by the fifteenth century monu-ment to The Earl and Countess of Arundel. Those wonderful lines: “One sees, with a sharp and tender shock, his hand withdrawn, holding her hand...”

Goodness how sad. But I didn’t wake up this

morning to write to you about Philip Larkin (whom I suppose you will loathe, on ideological grounds, no?) or to eulogize about the English countryside (to a Scot living in Belgium) or

the bumper size of the apple harvest (particularly good, this year, the Discoveries) or to pose as a Neo-Geo fogey, replete with sandals, baggy trousers belted with an old silk tie, and a sleeveless somewhat moth-eaten pullover worn loosely over a wash-rotted flannel shirt (to the chatelaine of an auteur fash-ion label)—which by the way is as much the correct attire for an upper-middle-class apprentice-ship in Communism, as tweeds for a grouse moor or khaki for an Atlanta quail shoot.

No—I awoke to these dripping trees (the ones beyond my window, that line the top of the drive, are from the south-ern states of America and called, somewhat poetically, Liquid Amber; when their leaves fall, they seems to do so with a slowly sweeping, arc-like pendulum motion, elegant roseate curls, in a way which brings the word

“mellifluous” to mind, which can mean, “flowing like honey,” which gets it) to properly thank you for the remarkable present that you gave to me, quite out of the blue, earlier in the year,

the impact of which is still with me, as resonant as one of those imperative, richly toned bells that you can hear almost any-where except England.

Although it’s more than just thanks: it was the timing (perfect timing) which made me catch my breath upon open-ing that secure but makeshift portfolio that arrived from your colorfully named street in your adopted city—a city that always makes me think of rain, but in a good way. And yet so unex-pected—which I suppose is the basis of perfect timing, or at least a vital element in the formula of synchronicity. For there, pristine and fresh within their tissue wrapping, were your four drawings of four young Englishmen—of the kind who would remember only too well the atmosphere of the school in August, or the blowsy roll of the North Downs—who for their own reasons, as simple and as complicated as you like, became known as spies (glamorous) and then, more ugly, traitors.

Each of these portraits possesses its own distinct per-

sonality, in its own style; I know of no other living artist who is as great a connoisseur of Style as yourself—and Style, as we know, is a serious business. It can even lead to treachery, betrayal, and worse. But there they are, alive in my chintzy drawing room, amidst back issues of Coun-try Life, Edith Sitwell’s biog-raphy of Alexander Pope with the cover by Rex Whistler, and Nicky Haslam’s new book about his hunting lodge (won-derful, by the way). Yes there they were: Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean…. Names I grew up with—names that seem to come from a prep-school register.

Oh, and they look like dependable uncles you could always confide in, or favorite cousins whom you loved to be teased by…and you with youth on your side…and you had drawn each of them as though channeling not only the temper of the subject, but as (or more) important, an idea of the art-ist: the artist as, might we say, a character in an accumulat-ing fiction of her own creation…

And speaking of Nicky, he very kindly sent me a book the other day—a wonderful old copy of his American brother-in-law’s study and collection of

“collective nouns”—some resur-rected from the Books of Venery enjoyed by style-conscious gen-tlemen in the fifteenth century (such as our old friend the Earl of Arundel, buried at Chich-ester, whom we met earlier). The book is called An Exalta-tion of Larks, which I thought you would like, and it contains amidst 250 charming engrav-ings of the Gothic surreal kind, some 1,100 examples, many arcane, of those terms such as

“A Murder of Crows” or “A Rage of Maidens.”

Of course, thinking of you, and our correspondence, I rushed to discover the col-lective noun for “artists”—and was rewarded, with another sharp intake of breath, to find the term “An Illusion of Paint-ers”. Reading on, the etymol-ogy could not have been more apposite:

“The term is ‘Misbeleue’ which, according to the

Oxford English Diction-ary, has more the sense of ‘erroneous belief ’ than ‘refusal to believe’; hence ‘illusion’ in the sense of ‘trompe l’oeil’.” And what could be truer—

of you, of me, of spies and double agents, of artists as characters in their own fiction, and of this correspondence?

As always I send you my love. To Helsinki I return, to mourn the wounded angel. Work it out. I will write again from there. Ever,Michael

· MICHAEL BRACEWELL

FIRST LETTER

LUCY MCK ENZIEAND ALAN MICH AELSEP T. 20 – OCT. 20, 2013

Unlawful AssemblyBook, Numbered edition of 150, Published by the Fiorucci Art Trust

Art dealer Orran Kirby is up to something more sinister than social climbing on the island of Stromboli. Lucy McKenzie’s extended short story “Shooting Diary” details the charades of Kirby, Wim Dierickx—the wealthy artist Kirby repre-sents—and a group of collec-tors as they holiday at a rented beachside villa. Dierickx is shooting a pornographic art film, and its star, Teta, is show-ing signs of despair. Will the young sleuth, Hannah, uncover the island’s secrets?

A petty criminal com-mits murder and turns his vic-tim into a Hockney sketch. An erotic cartoonist deals in coun-terfeit money. An artist-in-res-idence on Stromboli persuades old associates to be his mate-rial for a new project. Real and imagined characters are inter-woven in Alan Michael’s trio

of short stories, “The Nagging Flower,” “Magic Realism,” and

“Not Going to Lie,” taking read-ers on a disjointed journey of illusory depth.

These are the fictions that make up Unlawful Assembly, the first collection of short sto-ries by McKenzie and Michael. Their experiment with suspense writing came from a mutual interest in how the conven-tions of genres, like crime fic-tion or procedural painting, can be instrumentalized towards other ends. As they put it, their goal was, “the production of an adequate object—a paperback of stories, functional and narra-tive, designed to infiltrate the scenery and props of the leisure class at play.”

ALAN MICH AELSEP T. 20 – OCT. 20, 2013

Gases Rising, 2013Oil on canvas, 24.75 x 35.5 in. Courtesy Vilma Gold, London

Photorealistic painters face a new crisis in the digital age: more than ever, they are being mistaken for photographers

on screen. Alan Michael has painted a faithful rendering of a photograph of vinyl exhibition signage that could easily pass for an online installation shot—its wide-angle view catching the glow of a fluorescent light as it bounces off the wall. This obsession with focal depth and a fetish for reflection alludes to the very thing Michael prizes about classical photorealism—its potentially endless, yet ulti-mately shallow surface fabric: an analogue to the conservative procedural formalism of much crime fiction. Here he re-uses the typography designed for the cover of Unlawful Assembly, taking us full-cycle with his appropriated imagery.

LUCY MCK ENZIESEP T. 20 – OCT. 20, 2013

Quodlibet XXVII (Unlaw-ful Assembly I), 2013Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 23.5 in., Courtesy the artist

Quodlibet, Latin for “what pleases,” is a specialized form of trompe l’oeil painting that depicts everyday items like playing cards, letters, ribbons,

and books as if they were sim-ply lying around, rather than carefully arranged for the pur-pose of painting. With a darkly humorous twist on the genre, Lucy McKenzie’s pin-board quodlibet is reminiscent of the research mind-maps of TV detectives and sociopaths alike. It shows materials related to the artist's short story “Shooting Diary,” and contextualizes the photographic works Stromboli (1-3) and Unlawful Assembly Book Cover Options. McKen-zie invites viewers to treat the painting as a clue to her process and the aesthetic decisions lead-ing up to her writing project—a book that was also the occasion for this painting itself.

JOSEPHINE PRY DESEP T. 20 – OCT. 20, 2013

Unlawful Assembly (Cover Art Print), 2013Pigmented inkjet print, 12.5 x 18.75 in., Cour-tesy Reena Spaulings Fine Art

In the 1970s, Penguin repub-lished a back catalogue of Scot-tish novelist Muriel Spark’s

fiction, and old standbys like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means got updated covers. As might be expected for a writer like Spark, whose works have female protag-onists, the new covers featured a series of portraits of middle-aged women. And yet the figures in these pictures, taken by a com-mercial photographer named Van Pariser, hardly matched the quick-witted heroines of Spark’s oeuvre. Pariser’s women are shot in soft-focus and look dreamily into the distance. Reminiscent of David Hamilton’s subjects, but as grown women, their vapid expressions are a far cry from Spark’s self-assured heroines.

Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael wanted to explore how gender continues to play a role in cover design, especially in books by female authors. They collaborated with photogra-pher Josephine Pryde to make a cover image for the second edi-tion of Unlawful Assembly, one that could fit seamlessly into Pariser’s Penguin series and be similarly disconnected from the book’s contents.

LUCY MCK ENZIEAND ALAN MICH AELSEP T. 20 – OCT. 20, 2013

Unlawful Assembly Book Cover Options, 2013Digital print, 16.75 x 10.5 in., Courtesy the artists

Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael recently completed their photo collaboration with Josephine Pryde for Unlaw-ful Assembly and show a few of the results here. The typogra-phy in three of the designs, an oversized courier font, has the look of Spark’s Penguin covers from the 1970s. It riffs as well on the detective novelist writ-ing away on her typewriter—a cliché as well-worn as trench-coats and dark, stormy nights. The fourth image shows Pryde’s photograph within the graphic identity of McKenzie and Michael’s first edition of the novel, designed by HIT Studio, Berlin. One of these versions (hint: it has the glint of spring leaves) will be used for the sec-ond edition of Unlawful Assem-bly, forthcoming from Walther König Verlag.

LUCY MCK ENZIESEP T. 20 – OCT. 20, 2013

"Stromboli" (1–3), 2013 Digital prints , All 4 x 6 in., Courtesy the artist

If we follow the clues of Lucy McKenzie’s quodlibet close enough, we notice a book turned open to a photograph of four headless acquaintances, or rather four bodies that are cap-tured from the shoulders down. Novelist Muriel Spark took the enigmatic image in 1988 on a trip to Florence, and it serves as the blueprint for McKenzie’s photographic series "Stromboli".

McKenzie’s images use a similar framing strategy, with an anonymous social scene on the crumbling façade of an Ital-ian villa. The incomplete picture is intriguing, not only for what it lacks, but for the capacity of its surfaces—of legs, hands, feet, and torsos—to commu-nicate affectively with us.

LUCY MCK ENZIEAND ALAN MICH AEL

SEP T. 20, 20136:00 –8:00 PM

Leitmotifs of narcissism, inef-

fectuality, and paranoia charac-terize Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael’s first collection of short stories, Unlawful Assem-bly. The book was intended as a cheap holiday read to enter-tain and titillate visitors to the Aeolian Island of Stromboli, all the while reflecting their situ-ation with a measure of hyper-bole. The artists anticipated the writing as a means of generat-ing content for their visual art, and so now, the text lives on through a series of paintings and photographs.

McKenzie and Michael will open the season with an exhibition of this work. Also included, is a new collabora-tion with Josephine Pryde, a photograph for the cover of their book’s forthcoming sec-ond edition from Walther König Verlag.

HOPE HODGK INSON STY LISH SPINSTERSOCT. 1, 2013

7:00 PMIf a spinster is a woman defined by what she lacks, then the

oxymoronic stylish spinster disturbs us because she seems, like the author Muriel Spark herself, to privilege style over any realized substance.  Liter-ary scholar Hope Hodgkins argues that in refusing to play games in which female style is only a code for male desires, Spark’s spinsters engage in a Baudelairean dédoublement, dispassionately viewing them-selves and others in ways that seem impossible for the men who observe them.  But, she points out, they also wear the signs of their longings, whether for Mussolini or Schiaparelli or death, betraying a self-aestheti-cizing desire as fully dangerous as the male gaze.

Dr. Hodgkin’s lecture at The Artist’s Institute is entitled “Muriel Spark’s Stylish Spin-sters: Miss Jean Brodie Past Her Prime”.

LUCY MCK ENZIEAT HU NTER COLLEGE

OCT. 10, 20137:00 PM

This semester Lucy McKenzie is the Kossak Painting Program

artist-in-residence at Hunter College. McKenzie will share her approach to art-making with students over a number of weeks this fall, and will give a public talk about her work to mark the commencement of these activities.

Join us on October 10th at 205 Hudson St, Hunter’s new MFA Studio Building in Tribeca, for a conversation between Lucy McKenzie and curator Jenny Jaskey.

This event was made pos-sible by the Kossak Painting Fund at Hunter College.

·EPISODE ONE

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