2019 JULIAN SCHNABEL
"Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of," David Bowie once said, "and when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting." Julian Schnabel, one of the world's most influential living artists, should have every right to remain in familiar waters, hugging the comfortable coastline, yet time and again he braves the unknown.
Port of Lisbon (2010), from Schnabel’s Navigation series, incorporates three Cold War-era maps. Two are maps of Lisbon, Portugal, which were published by the British Navy in 1964 and 1971 respectively. The third is a map of Cuba that the United States Defense Mapping Agency published in 1981. A python-thick trail of purple oil paint snakes downward from the upper “Cuban” half of the painting to one of the lower “Lisbon” quadrants, tracing an impossible journey backwards through time. On top of the purple, Schnabel has painted a large crimson mass with spiky, flag-like arms that radiate outward in several directions, as if the red paint were furiously attempting to signal to us using semaphore. Schnabel says he painted Port of Lisbon in Mexico. "I remember it was a windy day, so some soil and bits of vegetation blew across the maps and got embedded in the paint." The literal presence of Mexican soil on American and British maps of Cuba and Portugal adds yet another layer of geographical ambiguity to the work. In Port of Lisbon, we could be anywhere, it seems. Or nowhere.
All three maps are hand-stamped with the all-caps message "NOT TO BE USED FOR NAVIGATION." The Cuba map includes an additional, equally puzzling admonition to “DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED,” and a secondary warning: "The prudent mariner will not rely solely on any single aid to navigation.” At the bottom, there’s yet one more note of caution: “Numerous reports indicate that many of the lights and other navigational aids on the coast of Cuba are unreliable.” One of the Portugal maps comes with a rather eerie warning of its own: “A Local Magnetic Anomaly exists in the area indicated on this chart.” These odd warnings, which Schnabel swears came with the original maps, raise interesting historical questions about why the maps were made in the first place and how they were intended to be used, if not for navigation!
Because Schnabel has commandeered these maps and redeployed them in an art context, of course, it changes their meanings. Understood as conceptual or narrative elements, the warning labels foreground the unreliability of the maps that form the structural backbone of the painting, much as a novelist might present readers with an unreliable narrator, forcing us to question and critically analyze each successive detail, searching for clues and contradictions within the text. We proceed with caution, remembering as we go that the interpretation of art is never clear or simple. Sometimes we find ourselves in unfamiliar waters, with faulty maps and bad equipment, and we must navigate by dead reckoning alone, sailing ahead by intuition.
I asked Schnabel if he intended his Navigation paintings to suggest the idea of "sailing into the unknown," and if that's how he thinks about art in general. "Actually, I think that applies to everything in life," he replied, "not just making or interpreting art." He then gave examples from the lives of two of his friends, neither of whom is a visual artist, who have taken extraordinary leaps of faith, risking everything for the sake of the unknown. The first friend, Mingyur Rinpoche, is a highly respected Tibetan Buddhist leader and the abbot of a prominent monastery in India. One night, he snuck out of his monastery, taking nothing with him, and spent the next four years on what he called a "wandering retreat," living anonymously as a homeless beggar. Schnabel's second friend, Nathan Fletcher, is a championship surfer known for leaping out of helicopters to catch the world's biggest waves. "When you talk about how we sometimes find ourselves in unfamiliar waters," Schnabel said, "I think that must be a little bit like how Nathan feels when he's careening through the air toward a massive blue wave—or how Mingyur Rinpoche felt when he set out alone with nothing."
Some of the greatest journeys in life demand that we leave all of our old maps behind. And while it's true that we can't use Port of Lisbon for navigation, the painting serves as a good reminder that sometimes, to find ourselves, we must first allow ourselves the freedom to get lost.