#103 Nicholas Byrne and Gili Tal, Gib's Mir
A conversation between Gili Tal and James Epps
James Epps: How did you come to the title, “Gib’s Mir”?
Gili Tal: Nick was discussing presenting archive/source material and the process of going through it and then the question of coming out of the other end. It made us think of tracts etc which essentially produce/extrude something in a different format from how they entered. There were also ideas floating around of this work offering up all this material but in a way that was slightly intrusive or verging on aggression. ‘Gib’s Mir’ means ‘give it to me’ in German, it’s also the title of a D.A.F song and sometimes it’s written on the bins around the city in an annoyingly convivial way. It seemed to strike the right tone in this regard, it’s slightly passive aggressive. In relation to mine, I liked that it might help to convey a certain sarcasm in relation to the mark-making in the work and felt like some kind of a taunt or a dare. The other aspect of this taunt idea was that when Nick invited me to do the show with him he said he that he wanted to see what I would do….so give it to me…
JE: Is it important for viewers of the exhibition to see this as two separate artist’s work?
GT: Yes, I think so. Although there was discussion about what we would each show and how this might be read together, it was also important for both of us that there was space for the work not to be clipped too much by the imposition of an overarching theme/narrative, which would feel a bit false in this situation.
JE: How did you come to start using the suckers to attach the paintings to the wall?
GT: These smudgy/smeary paintings have been developing in my studio for a while. They started on shiny white A4 paper. The Plexiglas seemed to make the funny, sardonic aspect of the marks a bit more obvious as opposed to them looking like straight up Ab Ex or something. It also gave them a much more clingy, congealed feeling which was important …. I had been trying to think of how to hang them for ages and nothing seemed sympathetic and then came across these suction cups in a shop somewhere and sort of knew that that was what would activate them because then the painting becomes this multi-tentacled sea creature like body etc. The action of pushing it onto the wall also then gets contained as a very dumb and heavy handed, sort of lazy aggressive gesture… It all fed into the kind of things I’d been reading and working with: - previous work had included some text from Marx’s ‘Capital’, which contains a lot of imagery about vampires, cyborg type imagery and this sort of multi-faceted unquenchable thirst…
JE: Why have you chosen to work in a series, and how does repeating the imagery and forms affect the viewer’s experience?
GT: I liked thinking of them as one continuous body and there was also something funny about making these kind of paintings composed of supposedly expressive marks ad infinitum.
JE: The imagery of the women’s eyes and the kind of colours and gesture are reminiscent of fashion magazines and make-up samples, why did you use this particular aesthetic and imagery?
GT: The pink immediately reads as bodily and for me started out in terms of these ideas about congealed labour and bringing that into sharper relief in a slightly lame and heavy handed attempt at resistance that everyone knows probably won’t work and will inevitably be co-opted as quite stylish anyway… these kind of marks I would normally associate with quite macho painting also. Made pink, smeary and reduced to finger painting scale it seemed to become ultra fem cliché taken to a degree that became a sarcastic retort. In this sense I like that the marks look a bit ticklish….
The collage elements are taken from fashion magazines and continue from paste ups I have been showing of models with one eye cut out that look like they might also be winking back at the viewer….so in the OUTPOST paintings there might be either pairs of these winking eyes in conversation with one another or people wearing shades as a sort of joke on the idea of offering some kind of protection from the deluge around…. The expressions and placement of the collage elements became really important in terms of activating these bodies normally gazed on; - they become like a series of female spies…
JE: You’ve spoken in the past about making nonchalant works, what is the particular motivation behind this and how possible is it to genuinely achieve this?
GT: I’m not sure if it’s possible to genuinely achieve this. I guess what interests me is the amount of effort it takes to create a feeling of ease and what ends up leaking out at the edges. What guides the mark making is this sense of swimming against the tide, trying really really hard and really obviously to keep things civilised or tasteful, which renders the end product ridiculous already…I think that in general, the interest in this idea of nonchalance or casualness comes from thinking about the tone of advertising or packaging or even the way political rhetoric might be conveyed. Often there is this level of totally breezy convivial chat which masks the actual seriousness of the ideology that’s present once scrutinised…
JE: You described the paintings and images within them as working like a series of screens, why have you come to use these particular devices?
GT: The marks form a sort of deluge. They are quite comic but there’s also a violence or something more insidious to them. This extends to the collage elements that are cut into and applied in quietly brutal ways. On the Plexiglas they started to remind me of car windscreens after a motorway journey… the collage elements thematise this and play with it as they are either a pair of eyes cut into and injured or covered by shades which stand to offer a knowingly pointless attempt at protection.
