Breaking free

"So conceited that he never sees below his nose," snickered a British scribe as we watched Julian Schnabel saunter into the Sala Grande for the awards ceremony at the Venice Film Festival last year. The director of "Before Night Falls" (it got Javier Bardem the Best Actor Award that evening) was dressed in a jaunty black-n-white checked lungi, topped by coat and tie.

My colleague's remark deterred me from asking Schnabel for an interview. But I didn't need to. Ten years ago, I had visited the celebrity artist in his New York home-cum-studio where he talked about the mystery of the creative mind, its movement from the concrete to the intangible. Those views are as relevant to his painting as to the two films he has made since then, on the artist Jean Michel "Basquiat" (1996) and writer Reinaldo Arenas "Before Night Falls" (2000). Excerpts:

What quality do you think is essential to respond to art?

IN music sometimes it is refreshing to be relieved from the literal translation of the song, the physical reality of it. Just listen to the feeling. No preconceptions. Usually the things I don't like in art are things that are not mysterious to me. Look, this painting here, it doesn't function as a window to vision, it is not just a representation of something, it juxtaposes itself to everything else in the room, and in that autonomy is the spirit which is embodied in that work. The physical facts, the materials, are the tools you use to get an ideation of a place or feeling, which is an intangible, not a materialistic quality.

You mean both the act of creation and response to it move from the logical-conscious to some meta-rational experience?

Consciousness is a responsibility for your actions.

If the work is wholly unconscious, it may be a work of God, it is certainly not art. I don't separate thinking from feeling. In a painting I use every element I can, also things I cannot compute into a logical-rational reality.

What makes an assemblage of elements come alive as art?

(Pointing to a painting) Come, sit here. Now look. Some of the gestures may be radical, unfinished, unresolved but the artist desired them to be like that, to have that electrical nervousness which keeps them always sort of agitated, always just about to speak. The viewer has to empty himself out to be able to enter this space of dreams or fiction, to inhabit it for a while. Then there is a possibility of a different kind of communication. I think the purpose of art is to affect the behaviour of people. Give them a sense of freedom, do something they thought was not possible, look at something that they didn't know was a possible vision in it. Not to look at something, but look through something, to cut a hole in the wall, to perceive another reality.

To enter another virtual-world ? How does the artist do it first?

There are always two things going on in my work. There's a pictoriality which is sort of space going back, but there's a negation of it also, insisting on its physicality, opaqueness. I'm not interested in making details go together. I want to make them find a way of going together to a place where I haven't been yet. Painting is practice, control. I know certain things are going to happen when I do something just because I've done it before. And then I take everything up to a point and try to do something I never did before.

G.R.

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