The Viennese modernist architect Adolf Loos often described his buildings’ exteriors the way he thought of fashion. “In its external appearance, a house can only have changed as much as a dinner jacket…[it] has to look inconspicuous,” he wrote in his 1914 essay “Regional Art.” Loos wanted the casings of his residences (like the unadorned English suits he coveted) to act as a “uniform” or screen to the outside world—bathed in white, devoid of ornamentation. What may come as a surprise to those familiar with the title of Loos’s lauded text “Ornament and Crime” but less acquainted with his architectural work is that his interiors are replete with luxurious finishes like walnut, mahogany, marble, and silk and that he went to great pains to create intimate environments inside the chambers.
The Brussels-based artist Lucy McKenzie inhabits Loos’s sensual hermeticism. In a solo exhibition that runs through September 22 at the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam, she presents his plans for the Villa Müller, in Prague, juxtaposing its aesthetic with that of the Moorish Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain. These interior views, which move from cool archetypal planning to more personalized bourgeois compositions, will lay the groundwork for a third element of the exhibition explicitly dealing with the body and its representations, both public and private. For this portion of the show, McKenzie will include elements drawn in various ways from her explorations on the edges of art. A new collection of Atelier E.B., a small fashion and decorative-art outfit that she runs with Scottish textile designer Beca Lipscombe, will be on view. To display the collection, the artist is designing mannequins to contend with specific challenges posed in presenting the female body—how to represent its figure without idealizing or denying its form. Whereas Loos hoped to discreetly suit his interiors, McKenzie confronts the inverse task, how to fashion a suitable armature for her garments. Further complicating this meditation and drawing it closer to herself, she will conclude the installation with work that makes reference to an exchange concerning the appropriation of her image in soft pornography shot by Richard Kern in the late 1990s.
McKenzie has long espoused an interest in the outmoded and redundant, in materials that have been drained through time and reuse. Many of her earliest paintings reiterate the dead ciphers of Soviet Realism and 1970s Scottish Muralism, exposing the failures of these utopian political projects while sympathizing with their staunchly idealist aims. What these aims ultimately provide her is the power of an idea—through its strangeness or obsolescence—to challenge any number of orthodoxies.
Within the genre of quote-end-quote contemporary art, one could not think of a more outmoded approach than McKenzie’s use of craft-based painting applications, exemplified by her tedious faux reproductions of marble and wood, trompe l’oeil still life, grisaille, and hand-lettered signs. From 2007 to 2008 she studied at the Van der Kelen-Logelain, a private school for 19th-century decorative painting technique in Brussels. The school’s prizing of technical craft stood in stark contrast to the expressionist and deskilled ethos of contemporary methodologies. While what McKenzie refers to as the school’s “autistic standards of judgment” were lacking in intellectual appeal, the school made up for this by failing to burden her with the logics of art history, assuming that the way forward for art was necessarily connected to the recent past: “I do not reject criticality nor do I wish for a return to the ‘good old days,’ ” McKenzie says. “It is that I question the accepted norm that art, and specifically painting, must develop in a direct line from the avant-garde and 20th-century modernism.” To drive that point home, McKenzie recently took a post at the Düsseldorf Academy, where she teaches Madame Van der Kelen’s principles.
Since receiving her specialized training, McKenzie has focused on full-room installations that make use of these techniques, completing their detailed finishes by hand with the help of an assistant. This production process nearly always takes place on-site due to the scale of the works, effectively turning oversize exhibition halls, such as the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, where she showed in 2009, into living tableaux of classical ateliers. Aside from an ongoing series of trompe l’oeil still lifes (which the artist prices according to Renaissance logic, by size, difficulty of application, and number of items), most of her painted works function as backdrops or near-life-size reproductions of architectural plans, with their scale and temperament adjusted to a particular project’s needs. Her early explorations with this format included semi-painterly reproductions of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s sketches in her exhibition “10 Years of Robotic Mayhem (including Sublet),” 2007. But her draftsmanship in recent years seems more detached and focuses on how images work within a given environment, rather than on their internal expression. Whether staged as rooms within rooms or painted directly on the walls, her scenes invite viewers to inhabit them, while enabling contemplation by way of an aesthetic distance.
Many artists repurpose paintings as props or background for other activities, shifting the emphasis from art as a self-contained gesture within a frame to its performative role among a range of actions. Dissatisfied with the nominal question of what makes a painting—much less the normative pondering of what makes a painting any good—artists are increasingly sensitive to how such a form might be used—to establish interpersonal or historic relations within the art context, to position artistic identity, or to infiltrate economic networks. All of the above aptly describe the expansion of McKenzie’s work in and out of painting. In fact, it is impossible to speak about her paintings without mentioning her other interests, including decorative art, fashion, and friendship.
McKenzie is committed to a set of creative intimates: artists and friends with whom she collaborates on projects, ranging from music production to fashion and fiction writing. She increasingly uses opportunities afforded through her painting projects in the art world to bring visibility to these pursuits, sometimes staging them within the art institution. For an exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich in 2011, for example, McKenzie dispensed with her solo platform in favor of a group exhibition with other artists and designers who work with textiles, showing their work alongside her paintings. She has invited her close colleague Alan Michael to join her in an upcoming summer residency on the Italian island of Stromboli, where they will be writing beach reads that can be enjoyed by others on the trip. The artists will make drawings to accompany the texts, which will be as much as anything an excuse to further an ongoing dialogue fostered through art production. There is no doubt that McKenzie is committed to both the theory and craft of painting. Yet to make the most of this format, she must find new ways to traverse the exchanges that arise to maintain the integrity of her artistic position.
McKenzie’s approach is risky in an art industry whose appetite for obscurantism has become a marker of success. In 2003 as a newly minted “young artist,” McKenzie sat on a panel in London to discuss the rise of the creative entrepreneur and the increasingly parallel worlds of art and advertising. “I wonder if integrity will be the new economy, another fetishized commodity,” she mused. One hopes that McKenzie’s artistic vision—something
deliberately outmoded, small scale, and stubbornly her own—will have the capacity to escape the art world while also living within it.
This article appears in the April 2013 issue of Modern Painters.