With Shameless Generosity: An Interview with Jennifer Packer

Jennifer Packer

Photograph by Vievee Francis © 2015

This interview was conducted by email between June 5 and June 16, 2016. My aim was to extend—in Jennifer Packer’s words, of course—her online artist statement which she wrote in 2012. I also wanted to know how she, as artist of figurative painting, views her work in relation to that long tradition in Western art. As our readers will discover, I told myself, Jennifer Packer, at this time in her career, is focusing her artwork not only on figuration but also on still life and forms or indoor scenes.

ROWELL

The main of your artwork that I have seen focuses on portraits/human figuration. But your portraits are different from those I know by other artists, especially those of pre-twentieth-century art. Then, too, there are other focuses of your art—for example, still life (flowers or bouquets), and forms (indoor scenes). But at this point in your career, your viewers, I believe, think of you mainly as a figurative painter. Do you remember how you came to human figuration as a focus for your work in a period dominated by abstract painting and conceptual art?

PACKER

I talk a lot about figurative or representational shame, which, for me, is a sense that representation is silly or embarrassing, that painting things from life is somehow less intellectually challenging or is inferior to Abstraction or Conceptualism. It’s a common art school conceit, but for many of us on the margins, we have barely seen bodies like ours represented in any fair, extensive, historical sense. At a certain point I started to think that the position of abstraction over figuration, the desire to systematically eliminate or suppress images of marginalized bodies under the guise of intellectual progress, was insensitive and sometimes just a basic supremacist gesture. My inclination to paint bodies, especially from life, is a completely political one. We belong here. We deserve to be seen and acknowledged in real time. We deserve to be heard and to be imaged with shameless generosity and accuracy.

ROWELL

Will you say more about “representational shame”?

PACKER

I was once told in graduate school that my paintings were “melodramatic.” I think that kind of lazy, stunted language could have caused me to hide, turn inward, and withhold essential, emotional information from the work. Sometimes your audience doesn’t want to bear witness to what is necessary and true for you. But it’s very difficult to be evasive with representation, especially when identity is involved. I think you risk alienating viewership because of the specificity and can feel ashamed because of the vulnerability. Most compelling works, to me, have an undeniable and pointed quality, though, where the image and content are insistent and the stakes feel high. I think painters like Kerry James Marshall and Nina Chanel Abney are examples of artists dealing with this particular issue.

ROWELL

As I view your work, I begin to think about that long human history of representation of the human as a face or as whole figure. But then I suddenly realize that your human figuration is not predicated on the intentions of figurative paintings that populate museums in, for example, the Western world. In fact, in your early artist statement of 2012, you wrote, commenting on your reclining figures: “I am not interested in classical representations of repose, or still life per se, except to acknowledge the presence of that ‘superior force,’ which has consistently been represented as the unwavering ‘gaze.’”

PACKER

Western painting has been so much about privilege and access to bodies. I’m interested in what extraordinary painting might be, but the vision within so many great historical works feels particularly limited and repetitive. For example, I have a lot of issues with the reclining female nude because it is almost always about the susceptibility of the female body. Her identity rarely ever feels complicated in the picture. If a sex worker is depicted, she typically does not appear to resist for or because of the painter...