Interview: Joel Kefali

‘It is more valuable perhaps to pose questions than to refuse to question or to believe oneself capable of resolving everything.’
– Jean-Luc Godard

Joel Kefali’s visual practice embodies an awareness of our modern processes for searching electronic circuits (nerves) of information in which the scrambled rhetoric resulting poses it’s own solution, namely that a decision to draw your own conclusion is fated by collective|individual inexperience; inasmuch as the choice to represent confident solutions from a Western viewpoint is perhaps doomed to inadequacy or even nihilism in non-Western eyes. Kefali selects imagery from a variety of sources, not least the freely available endless array of stock news footage, cultural and personal imagery on the internet. Kefali is engaged in the discourse of representational painting in a way that freely engages an evolving personal study of cultural theory.

MJ Kjarr: You mentioned earlier to me that the notion of obsolesence is an interest to you. I find this interesting in that painting is one of these older and perhaps obsolete technologies, yet it goes on successfully. I know that as well as painting, you are also involved with emerging technologies like digital animation. Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth 2 provided a practical insight for me into the power of obsolete technologies; ‘. . .Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.’ If there is a similar consideration in your work how does this manifest itself through the tradition of representational painting and similarly of animation?

Joel Kefali: To some extent I don’t see painting as oboslete. I see it as having a history that is so long and deep that it can almost not be shaken by other mediums but instead strengthened. You see this now with artists like Alys adopting animation and Monique Preto accomodating new technology into the long history of painting. I see painting like a piano, its sound can never be perfectly replicated synthetically or digitally, so it will always remain while the “latest” keyboard will one day be outmoded. I think these technologies, such as an analog synthesiser, something that has been rendered by computers and digital technology can be seen for their own merits and I almost think they are better when they are treated this way instead of as the latest thing. I try to do the same with my animation work, I try to avoid slickness and 3d animation, and instead look at the animation styles which were big 10 years ago and then push that in a direction that the slick 3d work can’t go in. This idea of obsolete is linked to the concept that we as a race are getting better, constantly evolving for the better leaving the last adaptation behind us. I personally think the world is slowly winding down, entropy. This idea of obsolescence was not heavily considered in this body of work, and I don’t see them as having a cohesive final answer. I like the quote “to pose questions…” This is something I do a lot. As a child I always wanted to know why. I read encyclopedias and was always interested in finding out how things work. I think this inquisitiveness can be seen in this body of work.

MKJ: More so than many Western locales, we have a modern art history which has developed based to a large extent on photographic reproductions. Your paintings ‘Pedro The Lion (live)’ and ‘Movie Explosion’ for me exemplify how New Zealand has changed little overall in global relativism etc. since the likes of McCahon discovered Cubism via magazines. The same effect is today experienced by the passionate music fan who has to live with photo’s and DVDs. Is this duality in your work, which reads somewhere between homage and observation, related to a particular endemic view or philosophical idea of New Zealanders, relative to global culture?

JK: I think it is obvious that we rely heavily on reproduction and means of communication to experience art in New Zealand. Julian Daspher addressed this idea very well, with his recordings of gallery noise and exhibiting a replica of “blue poles”. I think we are becoming less behind the times though. With the internet being so prolific we can see what artists have been doing this year, instead of waiting for a catalogue to come out and hopefully make it to New Zealand ten years later. What interests me though is the patches of information missing when we experience art or anything this way. Scales of paintings all become relative on the screen and flattened out. By seeing paintings in catalogues and computer screens our minds still make up parts of the painting and we think about it more romantically because its in a virtual space not a physical one. I’m so used to seeing works in print or on screens that when I see the work in real life I’ve often been disappointed. The mystery I had about the work is gone, or what I imagined it would look like has been shattered by reality. “Pedrothelion(live)” shows the lie in the paintings. The fact that it is live means I would had to have travelled to be there and taken a photo to then paint or otherwise I am painting a virtual experience. Movie explosion in context with some of the other explosion works I think shows the loss of truth in media. On the web, information is homogenized and not given any more [hierachical] importance, so lies and opinions flourish. We can’t tell what is actually true unless we can say we directly experienced it, but even then the person we would tell might not believe us. Infomania sets in.

Catalogue text