Excerpted from:

Kent Henricksen In Conversation with Bob Nickas from the forthcoming publication Kent Henricksen: A Season of Delight, published by The Bookmakers Ed., Torino, 2007.

BN: There are many sources for the imagery in your work, from the art historical to the vernacular, and they are often thrown into opposition with or played against one another. You also time travel — from the distant to the recent past — in the same piece. Can you talk about your sources and how you intermingle them?

KH: The figures and landscapes that I employ in my new work are appropriated from random sources, such as historical volumes, old newspapers, children’s books, or even French prints from the time of the Musketeers. The Mexican artist Jose Guadalupe Posada, Albrect Durer, Mercer Mayer, and Max Ernst are some of the artists constantly refer to. I keep an archive of these images that I use as a type of memory bank of past events, which I continually build upon and cull from in creating my own histories and narratives. As much as I combine imagery from opposing eras, I also try to create a broader dialogue by focusing on the interplay between both high and low culture. I’m interested in constructing a discourse or new history by taking bits and pieces to create an enduring narrative non-history. I think of it as a form of memory recollection or memory re-arrangement. In the same way that a person collects or keeps random experiences as memory, and mixes them up in their mind, I take random images and mix and re-arrange them on a single canvas. It’s more of a caricature or a hyper reality. On their own, the images are insignificant or relatively trivial, but combined with others a paradigm is formed.

BN: That term “fabricated histories” linked to what you’re referring to as “memory recollection” leads inevitably to the idea of recovered memory syndrome. This is always associated with painful experiences that are repressed — and this can be for many years — experiences that are often related to sexual abuse. Of course, there have been instances of individuals recovering memories of events that never actually happened. Many of the overtly disturbing images in your work can be read as psycho-sexual: the servitude, bondage, whipping, and associated with slavery. These are of course the only acceptable ways for a white Master to engage in “sexual” relations with the black man. But there is what we might call a psycho-sexual undertow with the seemingly benign imagery as well.

KH: I do think that there is a psycho-sexual undertow in my imagery that is reflected through these fetishistic, otherworldly-like vignettes. However, for me these stories represent more of a sense of yearning and desire than they do strict memory recollections. The narratives allude to the ethical and moral boundaries of pleasure and the parallels between gratification and pain. Everyone has differing thresholds and needs to satisfy; some like tying people up in their basements while wearing their mother’s clothing, others find satisfaction in having sexual relations with animals. My earlier work on the toile fabric most strongly depicts these conflicts between domination/submission and command/obedience. The idea of dominating objects of desire, which have historically been women, boys, and slaves, becomes jumbled into psychotic delusions, where sheep dominate young boys and women wearing masks control each other.

BN: Women wearing masks. Your Victorian dominatrix ladies make me wonder how important humor is to you, even if it is of a fairly black variety.

KH: Humor does play a major role in my work and is a tool that I utilize in the storytelling. There is an absurdist quality attached to my imagery, as boys become cloaked as hooded executioners or young girls dance and play with ghosts while they themselves are bound. At first glance these scenarios appear to be completely inappropriate and preposterous, but upon further scrutiny they can allude to psychological games and/or individual power struggles. For me, it‘s important for people to understand the sense of irony or black humor in my work as they translate these stories for themselves.

BN: The piece you had in “The Gold Standard” [ at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, NY, Oct. 22, 2006 – Jan, 8, 2007] was the first time you incorporated text, and with this particular image —a native man being torn apart by wild dogs as white men stand idly by — the text amplified an already disturbing scene. It read: “Here in the road was lying a dead body, mangled and scalped, which the dogs were eating.” What’s the literary source you’re quoting from? And are you planning other text pieces? I suppose what I’m really wondering is, you have a very large cast of characters, they “perform” all sorts of banal and bestial acts, and can continue to do so in infinite and perverse combinations, so where do you go from here?

KH: Both the text and image for this particular piece are appropriated from an issue of American Heritage from the late ’50s, a magazine that typically explores American history through it’s heroes, scoundrels, and popular culture. As with this piece, I’ve also integrated text into several other works and have either written the lines myself or gathered them from historical sources, such as passages borrowed from the diary of a girl living in Nazi, Germany, or other literary sources such as Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi.” A lot of the imagery and texts are violent and deal with cultural conflicts, in many cases between Native Americans and early settlers. I think of it as a Theatre of Cruelty where separate images and texts can be combined to create a new certainty, a new vision between an actual event and a general mental volatility that surrounds us.

For full interview please go to http://www.johnconnellypresents.com/press/view/733