Interview with Martin Constable
Chapter 1: The Non-Fiction
BE: Who are you? Why did you choose to be where you are now?
MC: I am the end result of a long series of accidents, moderated by a tiny bit of intentionality. If I could start over from nothing, I would invert that ratio.
BE: What is painting for you and what do you see in digital media?
MC: I adore both. Painting is like going for a walk in the countryside, it is sensual and unexpected. Working with digital media is like reading a novel: a place bound by someone else’s vision. When I get tired of one, I move to the other.
BE: What is two-dimensional and three-dimensional space for you?
MC: The lecturer in me would say that two-dimensional space is three-dimensional space that has been projected on a plane. The artist in me knows that the appeal of painting lays in the fact that it depicts an illusion of dimensionality which frustrates our desire to enter it. I believe that this is true of all paintings, not just those which are representational. This is evidenced by the strong desire we feel to touch paintings when in their presence.
BE: What is Bright the Below?
MC: I am an artist who knows everything except the difference between up and down – I overthink to the point of self-destruction. Ha Ninh is a completely different animal: his compass is always sure and true; he is intellectually honest and completely lacks fear. His curatorial responsibilities he has taken very seriously and the focus he has brought to this exhibition is invaluable. As for the end result… it was in part a response to the space: its constraints, its history and the way these expresses Vân Đỗ’s governing vision. I don’t know her particularly well, but it is clear that she loves art, loves artists and seeks to create a space which celebrates this love.
BE: I never met Ha Ninh in person but I can see that he’s both intellectual and fearless. Hope I can meet him soon. I met Van Do recently. When I see her again what do you think I should ask her about your exhibition?
MC: You could start by asking her if she enjoyed the exhibition. Maybe you could also ask her if she would find it useful in any way. I am keen to be of some service to the Hanoi creative community.
Chapter 2: The Limits of Imagination
BE: Do you prefer to be the engineer who built an artist or an artist built by the engineer?
MC: My father was a nuclear physicist and my mother was a fabric artist. When I was young, I would tell people that my father was an electric lightbulb and my mother was a swan. I hope to honor both of them in my art and I guess that I wrote ‘The Artist and the Engineer’ as a simple way to bring those two sides of me together.
BE: What do you tell yourself about the truth? Is it about facts or make believe?
MC: My father would have said that truths derive from other truths, and that their collective trajectory is that of an arrow: purposeful and aspirational. My mother would have asked me not to bother her with such questions. I believe that a thing can only be true if there is a human to recognize that truth.
BE: Why science fiction?
MC: The past is inherently a melancholic and finite domain; it just sits there and gently decays like a sack of old vegetables in the corner of a kitchen. In contrast, the future is an endless canvas onto which we project our world views. In this way, all science fiction is a ‘thing that is wished for’, even the dystopias.
BE: What is technology for you?
MC: All mediums are manifestations of technologies. This is as true of oil painting as it is of photography or digital art. An artist’s relationship to this technology is founded on problem-solving, which they seem to enjoy far out of proportion to its impact on the art object. In my experience of digital technology, such problem-solving has the tendency to overwhelm. I can spend weeks on perfecting a single corner of a digital print, yet rarely spend more than a few days on a painting.
BE: Moving image or still image? Is there any difference for you?
MC: In my videos I separately consider the motion of a camera from the motion in front of the camera. I find the former the more evocative of the two and try to treat it as if it were a metrological condition.
BE: Your artworks are mostly dark and depicts environmental destruction. What is the meaning of an end?
MC: The end of a nation, an empire or a city is a fuzzy thing. Rarely is it complete or absolute. For example, by some measure contemporary European culture is the long tail of the Roman empire, arrived at by a long cycle of growth and decay. This process reveals the inner workings of culture: its foibles, its uniqueness. To put it simply: the most efficient way to understand a people is to look at their remains.
Chapter 3: The Beginning of An End
BE: What is fear?
MC: Fear is the little death.
That’s a positive way to perceive fear, don’t you think?
Fear has an ancient purpose, which should be respected.
BE: What is trauma?
MC: In 2001 a series of events destroyed my faith in art. Between that point and 2020 I made a grand total of three paintings. It was Vietnam which cured me. From my first day here, I knew I would start painting again and I am grateful for this. However, to get to where I am now required that I learn how to subsume those events in my work. I don’t claim this is a unique experience. It is an observable fact that an artist’s practice is founded more on what they have lost than what they possess.
BE: Why Vietnam?
MC: I’m not entirely sure but maybe it has something to do with the lighting. I was raised in London and lived a lot of my life in Singapore. Both of those places are very flatly lit, like a body in an operating theatre. In contrast, Vietnam is spotted with dark regions which lends it a profound spatiality. Another reason might be the fact that for most of the 20th century Vietnamese painting kicked ass – easily the best in South East Asia. I respond positively to that kind of thing.
BE: What was the most memorable dream that you have had recently?
MC: A few weeks ago, I dreamed that I had lost the desire to paint. The following day I was working on a single canvas in my studio. Nothing I painted on it seemed to work. It took three days for me to break this spell. Proof yet again of the power of the subconscious mind.
BE: If life is a cycle, what is the meaning of the future?
MC: The cyclical nature of life is not that of a neat-looking mandala, rather it is like the ‘grinding’ of one of those unwinnable massively multiplayer online role-playing games: boss fights, power-ups,
BE: What does your final boss look like?
MC: My wife?
The Consequences of Being in the Present
It all started from a crash. In a cockpit, full of shouting and panicking. Life is at stake. End is about to be created.
To see a spacecraft in nowhere land is to see imagination in endless thoughts. We are bound to think about the end just to realize that we are always in the state of in-between. Between the past and the future. Being in the present is strange isn’t it? After his spacecraft crashes to the ground, Martin is a stranger taking photographs in outer space. He is witnessing the darkness of space, the destruction of civilizations, and a dim light of hope. In search of his way back to the earth, Martin starts to think about the strangeness of the present.
Bright the Below is a way to understand our current state. Us in the present. In the era where information collides, our minds must travel exceptionally fast. It is today that we clearly understand the fleeting moment called the present. The present is fast, it is now and then ended. In the Bright the Below, Martin Constable tries to convey moments before the start of the present by creating the state of the end.
A series of black-and-white landscapes featuring building ruins serves as a way to imagine past events projected onto today. At the same time, the unidentified locations prompt us to envision current situations in the future. Martin’s works place the viewer in a multilayered present-day scenario. This scenario is often found in works of science fiction. We are invited to experience the present in the future, imagining changes in life through technological advancements that do not yet exist today. What is the meaning of existence? The works in Bright the Below also invite us to imagine our own existence in previously unimaginable situations. What would you do if you were stranded in outer space? How would you seek help when trapped in desolate, abandoned buildings? Martin depicts silent, desolate landscapes that signify life from the past for viewers who imagine themselves in the future. The present is indeed made to feel that strange in Bright the Below.
The suspenseful event at the beginning of this writing is a reinterpretation of one of the moving image artwork in Bright the Below. Moving images create an immersive situation that somewhat limits the viewer’s imagination. However, Martin elaborates on a scenario that imagines the merging of fear and the need to think fast. Is this situation a projection of anxiety about the current society? A condition where the consumption of information is linked to the ability to survive. It’s as if absorbing information is a matter of life and death.
Life is the present condition that positions birth as the past and death as the future. In this understanding, the present moment doesn’t feel fleeting and tends to feel prolonged. The present condition then becomes less strange (now we feel like we can experience it well enough), even though the future feels so brief (death and it’s all over in an instant). I have been thinking about what is life after death. Is it true that I will be either in heaven or hell, or am I going to be a different person or creature in different time and space, or probably just an end, pitch black, that’s it, done. The thought of living a temporary life is just strange (to what end?), as strange as the idea of living forever (how do we even comprehend the curse of eternity?). So is the strangeness of the present. We think that we are in it and suddenly we are not.
I think about dark, deeper feelings of doing something to keep you alive when I first encountered Martin’s works. It’s about loving an end that defines how you live your life. What is art to an artist? What is Bright the Below to Martin? I see art as a way to imagine probabilities of life, and at the same time, art is a way to endure life. To endure being in the present.
The series of works by Martin Constable in Bright the Below could be seen as an attempt to experience the present moment through the imagination of various possibilities of existence. Where does this existence take place? Probably does not really matter. Existence means experiencing life, perceiving the present moment. Bright the Below explores many ideas of the present by illuminating dark, uninhabited situations. Light becomes the key element in this exhibition. The existence of light creates forms and their shadows, as much as humans and their shadows. Symbolically, humans are always accompanied by the darkness of their shadow. The closer humans get to the light, the dimmer their shadow becomes. The closer the viewer examines the works in Bright the Below, the more vividly the present is illuminated.
(Interview and Exhibition Essay for Bright the Below, a solo exhibition by Martin Constable, 2–30 November 2024, Á Space, Hanoi, Vietnam)