Jonathan Podwil, Meeting 1983 (small triptych), 2006
There is a short, grainy film currently posted on Google Video that records a meeting which once took place between Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein back in 1983. As the New York-based artist Jonathan Podwil explained to me when I met him at Plane Space in New York prior to the opening of his show there in January, it was a meeting that the current administration in the Whitehouse would rather forget.
"It was during the Iran-Iraq War, which went on for about eight years during the 1980s. The official position of the United States during that time was neutrality, so this meeting wasn't really for public consumption, because basically we were propping up the Iraqis - otherwise Iraq would have been overrun by Iran - and yes, we were giving them weapons."
Whatever of the motives of that policy then, it looks absurd now in the light of the recent war, and so the fuzzy remnants of this film have become something of an icon for the anti-war movement. In any case, records which point to such strange political volte-faces are compelling whatever your perspective on the war, and Podwil himself has obviously been hooked by this one as his new show contains a series of paintings which have evolved from just one still taken from the film.
"The better-known part of the film is the bit when they come in and they're shaking hands," he explains, "that's become the icon." But Podwil has concentrated instead on the moment when the two pols awkwardly take a seat on a massive curving couch with their advisors by their side. Strangely, the poor quality of the film already lends the moment a painterly quality of its own, the window behind the men dissolving into a creamy glow and the light bouncy off the glossy floors and walls.
"I'm intrigued by situations in which historical, political figures who were once allies turn against each other," Podwil continues. "About eight years ago I did a lot of work relating to the funeral of Rommel, the German General during World War II, and I made a lot of paintings of Hitler and Rommel in the desert. Actually there are a lot of parallels here, because Rommel was basically forced to commit suicide when his plot to kill Hitler was discovered."
The existence of the film footage of the meeting between Rumsfeld and Saddam was a particular attraction for Podwil as his work has often involved a dialogue between painting and film; he has frequently exhibited his own films alongside his paintings, though the fact that this new series is based on a pre-existing source led him to exclude film this time. "A lot of my work is like this, based on historical materials. I also did some work based on the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination. I tend to start by putting a lot of detail in and then pushing it back, it's about how little information I can include and still have it read."
The 'Meeting' series is certainly spare in detail. Shadows curve in from the sides as if they were threatening to plunge the whole scene into gloom; the decorative table in foreground gets reduced to an eerie, brightly lit symbol; and the men themselves seem swallowed up by the vast couch which curves around them as if it was the side of an arena, a bull-ring. The latter rather suggests that Francis Bacon's influence stands behind some of these pictures - Bacon's figures often seem confined and tormented in shallow arenas. But other comparisons also suggest themselves, from Goya to Richter to Tuymans.
Podwil didn't use any kind of device like a projector to ensure that he reproduced the image accurately each time, so inevitably different qualities come to the fore each time as the focus changes. "They're far from being portraits," he says. "It's more a matter of describing the atmosphere. In fact, they are significantly different from the original image. I think if you reproduce an image several times you become very familiar with it, and after a while you're not thinking about the subject matter, you're just using it as a formal jumping off point to talk about other things. The dark areas are very important to me. It's important that they have a lot of texture, the suggestion that there's a lot going on under it."
But what that might be that's going on in the shadows is hard to say, as in each picture the smoky hues suggest something slightly different. In one picture Saddam hovers on the couch shakily, looking dark and lumpen like an ape-like beast; in another the olive green of his military fatigues appear more like a long shawl, and he seems as if he's sitting urbanely, relaxed and sated in the shade at a Middle Eastern souk. Podwil's series suggest all kinds of possibilities - and, one wonders, given the bizarre somersaults that history has taken with regard to Iraq, whether one day Saddam might find himself reclining without a care in that souk.
Jonathan Podwil lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has exhibited in a number of solo and group shows in New York as well as abroad in Austria, Denmark, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland. His previous exhibition at Plane Space was reviewed in Artforum. He received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, whereupon he continued his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Konstskola Forum in Malmö, Sweden.
Morgan Falconer
Jonathan Podwil
5 January-4 February 2007
Plane Space
102 Charles Street
New York, NY 10014
Tel: +1 917 606 1268
Meeting 1983, 2005, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches
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