Ingrid Schaffner

Author: Ingrid Schaffner

  • “Doing Nothing” The Big Nothing. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2004, pp. 17-33

    Doing Nothing

    The only way to understand modern life is to grasp at nothing. Because there it is, at every turn-profound, banal, substantial, inescapable. Pick up a nineteenth century novel and count the number of times people find themselves doing, or saying “nothing.” Or switch to the twentieth century and watch two bored high school students in American Graffiti having this exchange: “Where are you going?” “Nowhere” “Can I come along?” This could be a scene from a Samuel Beckett play or a riff from the 1965 Fugs’ tune (“Monday: nothing, Tuesday: nothing, Wednesday and Thursday: nothing…”), or any other existential depiction of life’s absurdity, or of life in general. For doing nothing is a quintessential part of modern experience. In previous eras, people were busy working seven days a week. Since industrialization regulated work, we now have designated time-off, weekends, vacations, leisure periods. A leisure class leads cultural aspirations and dreams. No wonder we find nothing represented so widely and with such persistence,

    “Nothing happens until something moves,” said Albert Einstein. Quite the understatement given the magnitude of his equation (e=mc2) to describe how a small amount of matter could release a large amount of energy and the terrifyingly big nothing unleashed by it. The atomic bomb changed modern consciousness as radically as Sigmund Freud’s formulation of the unconscious-that part of the mind of which we know nothing. And as far as day-to-day living goes, this is probably the best place to keep the knowledge that the world can destroy itself in a blast. (Is it reassuring, or alarming, the 12,000-page United Nations document proving the non-existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?)

    The Big Bang is one of many theories about the birth of the universe, which cosmologists generally agree came from nothing. Outer space has always beckoned contemplation and imagination with limitless thoughts of nothing. Now virtual space opens up, right on the desk-top, sucking us into realms of work, play, and communication that are strangely boundless and completely ordinary. Indeed, we can inhabit the idea of nothing as easily as we switch on the television to watch a re-run episode of the popular Seinfeld, which famously pitched itself as a show about nothing. Watching the characters spin endless drama out of life’s littlest slights, hopes, disappointments, and pleasures, might make one consider the Buddhist’s letting go of all such attachments a better sort of nothing to aspire toward. Or not. Gustave Flaubert once claimed, “What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments.” Instead he wrote a greater book-greater simply because it was written-called Madame Bovary, a novel about a woman whose dreams of modern life lead to her self-destruction. This brings us back to where we started, Isn’t that just like nothing? To lie in wait at the very beginning and end of every tale?

    Nothing is certainly essential to the telling of modern art’s story, a history of reductivist impulses, refutations and refusals. “Art does not exist,” declared the Dada poet Jacques Vaché, around the time of the First World War and early on in a century that chimes with anti-art movements. The sense behind such nonsense was nothing more (or less) than a harsh negation of the potential for words (or pictures) to have meaning. Gestures are what signify. No matter how half-baked, absurd, or nihilistic, only action can clear the way of authority for new things to come. “Dada is nothing,” Marcel Duchamp elaborated, “It is destructive, does not produce, and yet in just that way it is constructive.” This from an artist whose legacy looms large over any account of nothing. His allegation that he would stop producing art in order to just play chess, was a logical (endgame) move given the 1914 introduction of the idea of the Readymade. Why waste time mucking around in a studio making things, when art can be nothing more than an idea? (In defense of her own non-writing habits, Gertrude Stein observed, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”) Duchamp’s thinking spawned a whole range of Conceptual practices, many of them proposing that the very absence of an object, or the act its dematerialization, could constitute a work of art.

    Ideas only got in the way of Kasimir Malevich’s purge of pictorial space. Conceived in concert with the revolutionary politics of the Russian avant-garde as a shock to the system in every sense, his Suprematist white-on-white canvases “reached a desert in which nothing can be perceived bụt feeling.” Reaching for just the opposite, minimalist painter Robert Ryman continues to work a stretch of that terrain by making art with almost exclusively white materials. “White enables other things to become visible,” he says of his interest in exposing the material qualities of paper, canvas, varieties of paint. Monochrome painting is the most absolute expression of modernism’s tendency to zero in on a specific problem to the exclusion of all others. It was according to a strict litany of negations, published in 1962, that Ad Reinhardt distilled his painting down to one-color, one-sized canvas: “No lines or imaginings, no shapes or composings or representings, no visions or sensations or impulses, no symbols or signs or impastos, no decoratings or colorings or picturings, no pleasures or pains, no accidents or ready-mades, no things, no ideas, no relations, no attributes, no qualities-nothing that is not of the essence.”

    One of the essences of Abstract Expressionism is the nothing that presumably comes between the viewer and the experience of art itself. Simultaneously elemental and metaphysical, this experience springs from a seeming contradiction. On the one hand, there’s the notion of a totally flat picture plane, devoid of illusion or depth. On the other, there was Jackson Pollock’s actual art, a physical and pictorial negation of painting as he (or anyone else) knew. He violently dripped and ecstatically poured paint onto canvas on the floor. The surfaces of these works appear to open out onto voids or project themselves as encompassing webs. Mark Rothko jammed together things that should cancel each other out-horizontal and vertical forms, warm and cool colors, the abstract and physical properties of painting–to convey a sense of existential conflict. Life’s ineffables, the sublime, the spiritual, are irrefutably resolved in death, which Rothko asserted was the subject of the monumentally sealed-off “Black and Gray” paintings that he started the year before his suicide. Coming in the wake of Abstract Expression, Eva Hesse was part of a generation to favor less monolithic, more tentative abstractions. Nevertheless, a profound sense of conflict was also at the core of her art. “Order versus chaos, stringy versus mass, huge versus small,” she said. When it all came together, as it did in her 1969 sculpture Right After, a saggy stretch of resinous cord, the results were, according to Hesse, a “really big nothing”: “It was very, very simple and very extreme because it looked like a really big nothing which was one of the things that I so much wanted to be able to achieve.”

    Andy Warhol achieved this degree of nothing in both his art and person. “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” he said, “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” His silkscreen painting used reproduction and repetition to level subjects as violent as race riots and as banal as Howdy Doody to being nothing more (or less) than pictures. At the same time, these paintings imbue those pictures with the empty beauty of glamour, thus showing art’s power to transform in a light that looked uncomfortably like the media’s. Every picture becomes the next picture, every shock a boredom. To preempt the disaster of boring one’s audience, Warhol’s films were constructed as a form of boredom itself. The five-hour long Sleep has the Oscar Wilde-sounding distinction of being a movie that is often talked about but almost never seen. Warhol was frequently asked to comment on his art. In response to the question, “what does it all mean?” he invariably replied, “uhhh….” or let one of his entourage speak for him. And it’s for this gesture that Warhol is crowned the king, or more aptly, the Elvis of nothing. Andy Warhol made it possible for artists to have no position in relation to their art. What could be more appropriate to an era of compliant consumer culture than a mirror facing a vacuum? For this is the nothing that comes of nothing, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Lear. For the generation after Warhol, it seemed there was nothing left to say. In a postmodernism where originality was no longer possible, appropriation and repetition became the preferred modes of cultural production. Using both the splendid shine of consumer goods and the punning home appliance, Jeff Koons literally put the vacuity (or vacuum) of pop culture on display.

    Having now arrived at approximately the present postmodern moment, it’s time to introduce this exhibition. A consideration of themes of nothing and nothingness in recent art, “The Big Nothing* follows on the account just set forth. But it originates from a completely opposite tide. Curatorially speaking, “The Big Nothing” is the flipside, or other, to “Deep Storage.” This 1998 exhibition, which I co-curated with colleagues from Siemens Kulturprogramm and the Haus der Kunst in Munich, looked at images and processes of storage, archiving, and collecting in contemporary art. In addition to presenting work by over 6o international artists, there was a small group of early modern precedents, all of whom could equally figure in “The Big Nothing.” Marcel Duchamp’s Boîtes-en-valise is a museum-in-a-suitcase, containing miniature versions of his own work including Readymades, such as the empty glass ampule, which he called 50cc of Paris Air, realized at mouse-scale. To construct his collage boxes, Joseph Cornell archived and researched the throw-away world of ephemera (culture’s little nothings). Cornell considered its transformation a metaphysical process-he spoke of the “métaphysique d’éphémères” after the poet Gerard de Nerval. For visions of emptiness, Cornell’s white boxes of the 1950s, inspired by the American transcendentalist poet Emily Dickenson, are full of sublime yearning. The art historian Aby Warburg’s picture archive inspired a project to categorize all the world’s images in a single Atlas that was destined to go uncompleted due to its own absurd impossibility. Eugène Atget’s photographic archive of Paris at the turn of the century is characterized by the surreal emptiness of streets and parks devoid of human presences. (Thinking now of early photography recalls a colleague’s story of his pilgrimage from Vienna to Austin to see what is considered history’s first photograph. “Why, it’s just a big nothing,” he said, peering at the murk that is Nicéphore Niépce’s 1827 heliograph.)

    Early modernism set a precedent for “Deep Storage” that was full of pockets of nothing. Many of the contemporary artists from that exhibition could slip into this current show with the selection of a different work, or by looking at the same work differently. For instance, Robert Rauschenberg’s famous Combines (part painting, part sculptural assemblages of objects evoking personal and collective memories) came after several years of anti-art gestures. His White Paintings were comprised of house paint just rolled onto canvas, and his 1953 Erased de Kooning Drawing was exactly that. “I was trying both…to purge myself of my teaching and…exercise the possibilities s0 I was doing monochrome no-image,” he later mused. In 1972 Lynn Hershman started an 8-year performance work, living her life under the assumed identity of Roberta Breitmore. Exhibited in the form of relics and documents-Roberta’s shoes, wigs, driver’s license, therapist’s notes, etc.-the piece was also a mask behind which Hershman’s own identity was eclipsed. Most relevant to “The Big Nothing” from “Deep Storage” was Peter Koglar’s 1994 untitled new media installation. A hole appeared to rove over the walls, a projection of the black hole that is infinite storage, the cosmic trash compactor, into which everything, someday, might virtually vanish. (Only three artists are actually represented in both shows: Richard Artschwager, Louise Lawler and Andy Warhol.)

    The slippage between everything and nothing is more than a coincidence, or curatorial sleight of mind. Whether it’s an individual or cultural impulse, collecting is an attempt to fill the void. We stock-pile things to pass time, to construct identity and create history, and to mark the world with signs to perpetuate our existence last long after we are dead and gone. Collect too much stuff, however, and you might as well have nothing at all. Take for example, the Collyer Brothers, those pack-rats of Harlem, New York. In 1947 they were found entombed, Homer starved, Langley buried alive, in the house they had filled with 136 tons of junk. There were 14 grand pianos that couldn’t be played, mountains of books that couldn’t be read, one union jack that couldn’t be flown, among a crushing mass of other things, all made inaccessible and useless by these two men, whose lives seem to have hardly been led. (Seen only at night, Homer was known as the “ghost man.”) A syndrome was named in their honor; those susceptible are generally describedbnbn8mbb as smart people who have trouble judging what to keep and what to chuck. One could imagine Collyerism becoming the malady of our times. The computer’s ever-present, ever-expanding capacity to store information seems to make it only that much harder to know what to delete. An economy of over-production, without systems of dismantling and recycling, creates more things than we need, cluttering the landscape (from closets to dumps) with things we no longer use.

    Collyerism calls for extreme remedies. But burning a path of destruction leaves only that. A more sustainable relationship between filling and voiding space is embodied by Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The last project Mies completed before his death in 1969, it is essentially two buildings in one. Above ground is a seemingly empty glass pavilion, designed as an open plan for temporary installations of contemporary art. Below rests the museum, an architecture of walls and galleries for the exhibition of historic works of modern art. Relegated to the realm of storage, the museum’s collection is virtually invisible from view according to Mies’s iconic architecture, which he described as beinahe Nichts, “almost nothing.” This nothing was the subject of a talk, given in advance of “The Big Nothing,” by the Chair of Architecture, here at the University of Pennsylvania, Detlef Mertins. Speaking of the pavilion’s flat metal roof (“quite something”) floating on sheer glass (“bearing on almost nothing”), Mertins conjured an experience of the sublime. This massive plane that stands between us and nothing, also causes us to experience some of nothing’s crushing terror. Furthermore, the upstairs/downstairs drama of the building as a whole manages to resolve a major conflict. Half-disappearing, the building offers a place to collect art, and a space to get rid of it, too.

    The impulse to store, on the one hand, and to erase, on the other, is the binary pulse of one and zero. This constitutes the entire language of the computer, a language in which “naught” conveys exactly half of everything written. Zero has always been a powerful idea-it eluded comprehension by both the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. Even after the cipher was first put down in clay by the Mesopotamians 5,000 years ago, it still took another 3,000 for the idea of zero to be considered worthy of contemplation. This in India, where Hindu religion revered the void. It took the West much longer to countenance zero. Not until the Renaissance, with perspectival drawing, Newtonian physics and calculus, did the idea of an infinity without substance take hold. These outtakes come from two recent books: Robert Kaplan’s The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, and Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. The fact that both were published around the turn-of-the-millennium-a boon to marketing, no doubt-does not explain their success. These books have been popular because they demystify the ghost in today’s machine, the computer, and make concrete the abstraction advancing science and technology. They explain nothing.

    A spate of survey exhibitions, including this one, are relevant for approximately the same reason: they show nothing. In 2001, “Big Nothing-Die jenseitigen Ebenbilder des Menschen” was held at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden Baden. A show of work since the 1960s, with a focus on painting, it viewed “nothing” as a form of likeness-that face of humanity we cannot see. Imagine looking in the mirror to find a fantastically slashed green Lucio Fontana “Spatial Abstraction” scaring back at you. (The exhibition title is no coincidence; organized by Matthias Vinzen, we co-conceived our shows after working on “Deep Storage” together.) Just a few months later, “Nothing” opened at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, in Sunderland, England. Organized by curator Ele Carpenter and artist Graham Gussin, this show featured very recent art and was accompanied by a multi-faceted publication. “Zero” historian Kaplan’s essay had a hole die-cut through one page, for instance. Another contemporary “nothing” show that deserves mention in this context (for both its title and content) is “The Big Nothing, Or Le Presque Rien,” held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and at the French Cultural Services, New York, in 1992. Taking as one of its premises Brian O’Doherty’s brilliant “White Cube” essays, this show of barely visible, ephemeral works “asked viewers to look into emptiness… [or] the presumed emptiness of the white, ideal museum space,” curator Kerri Scharlin wrote in the catalog. A footnote to “nothing” at ICA is Group Zero,” an exhibition, organized by Otto Peine, of work by an international affiliation of artists interested in art, technology, and new materials. (Eva Hesse’s eccentric abstraction has been linked to her early contact with Group Zero in Düsseldorf.) The 1964 exhibition included work by Lucio Fontana, Hans Haacke, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, and Piero Manzoni among others.

    So what is “The Big Nothing” at ICA? Occupying both of the museum’s main galleries on two floors, with a large “black box” devoted to screening a video program, this exhibition presents work by over 60 artists, from the 1970s (or so) to now. It was organized over the past two years by Associate Curator Bennett Simpson, myself, and Tanya Leighton, who has been intrinsic to it during her yearlong Whitney Lauder Fellowship. Our point of departure was the art history set forth in this essay, a point that soon vanished as we moved forward with our selection of contemporary art. We were guided by a sense of the prosaic vastness of our topic as a whole. Within the installation, even the most extraordinary-scaled works are completely matter-of-a-fact. The word “if” is writ large on the wall; infinity is inside that metal box full of colored lights and mirrors; that painting shows fireworks as commonplace spectacles; those canvases look empty; there’s a man crying; there’s the moon. Viewed collectively, these works say: nothing is not something we don’t all know. Interest lies is those particulars, which elude synthesis into one big picture. In absence, anarchy, the absurd, nonsense, zip, zero, infinity, atmosphere, ellipsis, negation, annihilation, whiteness, blackness, formlessness, the void, abjection, the invisible, the ineffable, noise, shutting down, shutting out, dead space, death, getting wasted, getting lost, cutting out, blanking out, vacancy, holes. This is what the individual works bring to the show. Each opens onto its own expanse of ideas, themes, and images of nothing as the annotated checklist at the end of this catalog gives some indication.

    Although this exhibition was conceived as a contemporary survey, it does contain a cursory history of the closed or empty gallery. (Just given everything nothing meant to the artists of the Arte Povera and Fluxus movements, never mind the broad strokes of minimalism and conceptualism, it would have taken an entire show to deal with the 1960s alone.) As documented by announcement cards, photographs and related ephemera, this history starts on April 28, 1958, with Yves Klein’s Le Vide at Iris Clert gallery in Paris, and comes up to the summer of 2003 with Santiago Sierra’s Spanish Pavilion for the 50th Venice Biennale. These and other works in this section show a gesture-so quintessential of “nothing” in art-that is not only surprisingly recurrent over the past 50 years, but also barely empty.

    Klein’s event was rigorously conceived and executed with specially engraved announcement cards (“in view”, he stated, “of the importance of this exhibition for the history of art… [and] especially so the blind can read it”) bearing an invitation by the critic Pierre Restany to witness confirmation of the artist’s “quest for an ecstatic and immediately communicable emotion.” In pursuit of this emotion the window glass was painted blue, the walls stark white. Special blue cocktails were served the night of the opening. A mob ensued. People yelled, cried, sat silently for hours. At least one communal moment occurred the following day; allegedly, everyone at the party urinated blue. Sierra’s three-part closure of the Spanish pavilion was no less considered. By bricking the entrance, covering the name of the pavilion, and creating an action that no one could see in a space that, after the event, only bearers of Spanish passports could enter, he drew attention to lines of obstruction drawn across the art world and the world in general. From situation to situation, the significance of the gesture changes. Nevertheless, no matter where, when, how the gallery was emptied or closed, no matter how negative or simple it seems, the act of stopping business as usual, continues to be a powerful mode of framing the gallery’s function as cultural, political, and social space.

    Space suggests size, which, as we all know, matters. It’s definitely what makes “The Big Nothing” big. Early on in the project, it was the topic’s sheer vastness-along with the combination of excitement and dread that it inspired-which prompted the idea of taking the theme of “nothing” to the community. Philadelphia is chockfull of collections, curators, and cultural programmers. We began with a small group of our colleagues in contemporary art to test their interest in taking on the theme of nothing and organizing an exhibition or event that would take place roughly simultaneously with the ICA survey. These first meetings were memorable in that we just talked about nothing. The extreme emptiness of the city’s Edgar Allen Poe house, a work by Patrick Raynal, the 1970s fad of sensory deprivation chambers, mildew, James Joyce’s Ulysses (a tome-long account of nothing-special of a day), the impossibility of really doing nothing. After about three such meetings, the group reached a consensus to engage the larger community. In May 2003, a “big nothing congress” convened to introduce the initiative, which ultimately attracted the collaboration of 35 other venues. The result is a constellation of exhibitions, films, lectures, music, and other events, all independently organized and loosely held together by nothing. It seems important to note that this wasn’t conceived as a festival, but developed almost organically. ICA’s role was to plant the idea and to organize a map-designed with artwork by members of the local artists’ collective Space 1026-locating all the participants. In her catalog essay, Paula Marincola treats all of the component parts of the pan-Philadelphia “Big Nothing” as objects in a fantastic group exhibition, rolling across the summer months, those cultural Dog Days that leave lots of time with nothing to do.

    Despite all this bigness, there still remains anxiety over things left out. This is always case with group shows, but when the subject is nothing, it gives new meaning to the phrase: fear of the void. Right now in New York, the Whitney Biennial includes recent work by Mel Bochner, who has been creating work on themes of nothing since the 1970s. Ditto Vito Acconci. His mind-boggling installation at Barbara Gladstone Gallery is a personal timeline treatise on nothing, from the abject groaning sounds emanating throughout the room, to the photo-documentation for Visions of a Disappearance (1973). A chance meeting with Dorothea Rockburne led to a discussion of drawings that made themselves, based on systems of folding. Oh well. This is “The Big Nothing,” after all. Every absence counts, as long as you have the presence to bring it to mind.

     

     

  • “An Ecology of the Art World” 2003 Pew Fellowship in the Arts Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of the Arts, University of Pennsylvania, 2003, pp. 6-14.

    An Ecology of the Art World

    “ARTISTS ARE AT THE TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN,” the late Ella King Torrey liked to say. This by way of reminding her colleagues at the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, which she directed from its start in 1991 to 1994, who it was they were working for. Not for the givers (a branch of one of the most powerful foundations in America), but for the gifted (those individuals the fellowship program was designed to support). Over the past 12 years, the fellowship program has awarded a total of $8 million to 162 visual, performing, and literary artists. At $50,000, the sheer amount of the grant—among the largest an artist can receive—confers priority, of which none of us in the cultural “food chain” should lose sight. Who needs curators without painters? Editors without writers? Publishers without poets? Producers without playwrights? Programmers without musicians? Festival directors without filmmakers? Patrons without culture to fund? Torrey saw the fellowship program as a link between artists and a resource that would help facilitate their work—but that wasn’t absolutely necessary to its creation. At the same time, she recognized that feeding artists fueled the larger agenda of the Trusts’ culture program. Only artists in the Philadelphia region can apply for a fellowship, which is given, like a salary, or stipend, over a one to two-year period. And yet, food chains are linear in a way that culture is not. It takes more than just having artists comfortably eating in a community’s midst to make culture. It takes many kinds, and levels, of participation and support, all acting interdependently. It takes more than a chain, it takes a dynamic ecology. Now that the Pew Fellowships in the Arts has been part of Philadelphia’s culture for over decade, it seems like a good time to look at its potential impact on the local ecology. But first, a little Dirty Water.

    While other children played Operation! Twister!, and Mystery Date, my sister and I played Dirty Water. This 1970s board game was a sort of Monopoly of its day, the goal being, not to amass real estate, but to build a healthy pond. Starting with single-celled amoeba (Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues), the first person to stock a bass (Park Place) won. The thing was, you couldn’t “afford” a bass until you had enough rotifers and duckweed in your pond to support it. Meanwhile, you were in constant jeopardy of landing in “Dirty Water,” in which case a chemical dump or a population explosion among the minnows could wipe out your entire ecology. The game was a lesson in environmental thinking— about large and inconspicuous populations energizing one another, and the need for balance, proportion, and diversity throughout any system. A similar thinking is called into play by this question of a cultural ecology.

    Who and what constitutes an art world? And here let me preface this by saying that the model I am about to build is based on my own experience in the field (or pond) of visual arts; but hopefully it suggests enough of a template to begin to describe other areas of contemporary culturę. Let’s begin with the artist (bass) population. As with any species, the young, or emerging artist seems to be at an advantage in a world that is always looking for fresh new work to promote. The most difficult stage comes mid-career after some initial critical impact or commercial breakthrough has occurred, when an artist is left basically alone to sustain and develop their work into something that is both personally and culturally significant. Sometimes just surviving this long middle period is enough to achieve the status of an established artist, whose work commands authority and support. A healthy art world finds artists at every level of experience working in all mediums (from watercolors to video), and scales (from outdoor monuments to printed matter), advancing academic traditions and radical new approaches, as well as working idiosyncratically outside any mainstream.

    The work produced needs an equally diverse range of venues to present it. In the arts, profit and not-for-profit spaces are often perceived as two different, sometimes adversarial worlds. But galleries are one of the most essential middle-grounds (with dealers being the middlemen and women) between in their studios and the rest of the art world. They can’t be the only place to see art, look at slides, and gather information, just as money can’t be the only form of validation. But in a healthy system, the more galleries thrive in their business of representing and selling artists’ work, the more the system rends to thrive as a whole. Not that it isn’t a challenge for an artist to get commercial representation. This is why the system needs to comprise a range of alternative, commercial and institutional spaces in which to see and show work. There must be bastions of culture, private salons, public sites, and spots where anything can happen, indoors and out—all with the requisite persons of vision and drive to run them.

    But what’s the point of making and exhibiting art if there are no means of interpreting and discussing it? There is no greater disappointment for an artist than to see an exhibition end without receiving at least one review. Ideally for the artist, a positive one, but even better for the art world are a number of reviews expressing differing opinions. In order for it to build consensus, spark debate, or just be kept in mind, art must be contextualized and re-contextualized. (To stop looking at and discussing a thing is to forget about it or worse, to take it for granted, which is also a form of ignoring it.) Creating frameworks in which to consider art is the role of curators and critics, writers and editors, scholars and educators, all of whom have a place in the pond. Room need also be made for the collectors, conservators, archivists, publishers, preparators, photographers, and handlers, whose special charge it is to care for culture’s objects and artifacts.

    To support this vast system of artists, spaces, professionals, exhibitions, publications, and storage, it takes a lot of money circulating through it. Money must come from government and foundation sources, from corporate and individual contributions, and from the sale and commissioning of art itself. It’s rare for artists to earn a living strictly from the sale of their work, and even when they do, many artists teach. Thus art schools serve as a vital source of income for artists. They are also where artists transmit their experience to other artists in the form of education. Indeed, at every level of learning, art enriches the larger ecology of the entire community. Children who grow up with culture as part of their curriculum are more creative thinkers all round. They are also more likely to participate in the art world when they grow up, if not as practitioners, professionals, or patrons, then as audience members.

    How can an art world thrive without an audience? As artist Marcel Duchamp put it, “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”[footnote=1] It’s that basic. It’s also that complicated, because neither is ever a given. Lari Pittman is a Los Angeles-based artist, who enjoys critical and commercial success for his painting, teaches at UCLA, and collects the work of his peers. Speaking at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a few years ago, he said that art should be deemed neither the province, nor the responsibility of privilege or government. You may not be able to afford a painting by Jackson Pollock, or for that matter, Lari Pittman. But artists everywhere are showing their first work at affordable prices, publishing inexpensive multiples, or selling drawings from their studio. Support them! If you have an idea for a show, find a space and do it. Write about art, talk about it, look at it. Join a local museum. Subscribe to at least one magazine. Pittman was advocating artists’ participation as a form of self-interest: How can you expect anyone to be interested in what you’re doing in your studio, if you don’t take an interest in what’s happening outside of it? By no means think to that it’s up to artists alone to support culture, though they can be its most enriching advocates. As critic Lucy Lippard so beautifully pointed out of the Minimalist artist Sol Lewitt:

    No single American artist has been so supportive of other (unknown, young, neglected, women, minority) artists. First his ideas and his openness to other’s ideas {helped formulate a new approach to artmaking}. As he became known, his emotional/intellectual support for other artists became still more valuable, and as his economic situation improved, he often extended that support to the financial domain, buying small works across a broad stylistic span. The generosity that characterizes his friendship, honest criticism and feedback, also informs his art. There is a hopeful, optimistic element in the permutational form he has chosen, which is one reason his work wears so well. It stays fresh because it remains in touch with the world?

    Pittman’s words, coupled with the example of Lewitt, could serve as oxygen for the whole system. An art world’s ecology thrives best when all of its coexisting populations are active, engaged, and sustain one another in the making and experiencing of culture—when all of its micro-systems are permutational,

    Model ecologies are perfectly proportioned and uniform; real ones adapt to regional conditions to yield local variations. So what are the features of Philadelphia’s art world ecology? For starters: its location less than two hours (by car) from New York City. To be in such proximity to one of the cosmopolitan capitols of an increasing global culture, just to be able to see first hand what’s going on in the bigger ecology—is an incredible amenity. But it also is the source of some ambivalence. In terms of national perception, Philadelphia artists are never accorded the same regional autonomy as artists in, say, Chicago or San Francisco, which are similar in scale, but not overshadowed by New York. The critic Barbara Rose refers to Manhattan as the souk, the great bazaar of the art world, where everyone goes to buy. It’s where Philadelphia collectors spend most of their money, as reflected by the city’s relatively small commercial gallery system.[footnote=2]

    On the other hand, Philadelphia is teeming with diverse museum collections and exhibition spaces, from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (a great encyclopedic collection and pilgrimage destination for anyone interested in Marcel Duchamp), to the Mutter Museum of Medical History (where artists routinely intervene with their collections); from the Fabric Museum and Workshop (commissioning local and international artists to create new work in new materials since 1977) to the Goldie Paley Galleries at Moore College (where the Moore International exhibition introduces to American audiences the work of established artists from around the world). The first city to implement “one-percent for art” initiatives in 1959, and home of the Fairmont Park Art Association, Philadelphia is renowned for its pioneering public art programs, as well as its penitentiary. The first panopticon prison in America, Eastern State is now a national park property that presents site-specific installations by artists. And this is just a smattering of the many venues for visual art in the city, which, curatorially-speaking, can boast another extraordinary asset. Also funded by the Pew Charitable Trust (and one of the Trusts six regional artistic initiatives that includes the fellowships [footnote=3] ), the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative (PEI) has, in just five years, raised the standard and ambition of curatorial work in the city by funding exhibitions and contributing to local curators’ professional development. For artists, this initiative means a growing awareness of the larger contexts, including historical and international ones, in which their work operates. PEI generates a lively discourse amidst the curatorial community that seems to have yet to carry over into the critical arena. Philadelphia, like most cities, spills very little ink on culture. And though the writers we do have are strong and established voices, they are too few. It was heartening to learn that the city’s new alternative newspaper, the Philadelphia Independent, will be starting a reviews column. But there is an urgent need for more reporting and reviews from within the community, in part to stimulate more consistent national coverage.

    Another important feature of Philadelphia’s ecology is its schools. There are five major art schools here, including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA, the nation’s first), Tyler School of Art, and University of the Arts, among others, as well as many art departments within area universities. After graduation, students typically made beelines to New York. However, in recent years, there has been a shift in that trend. Students are staying on, and young artists are coming here from other cities to settle. The artists who form the collective Space 1026, named for the address of their studios and gallery at 1026 Arch Street are, by and large, graduates of Rhode Island School of Design. Large spaces and cheap rents, and proximity to New York, are all incentives. But so is the Pew Fellowship. At least 77 of the Fellows are local alumni, who can literally testify: it pays to stay in Philadelphia.

    In search of other signs of impact on the local ecology, I spoke to Fellows and panelists. In response to my basic question, “What did the Pew mean to you?” I heard a surprisingly nuanced series of accounts. Apparently getting $50,000 isn’t a simple bonanza. In every case, artists’ experiences were quite personal, depending mainly on what point they were at in their work and career when they became a fellow. The painter Sarah McEneaney (1993) had been showing steadily in Philadelphia for over 24 years, since graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. When she got what she recalls to have been a very thin envelope notifying her of her fellowship, she said, “I was flabbergasted. But knew I deserved it!” It was the first major grant she had ever received and, as many concurred, it seems to have opened the door to receiving other grants and residencies. (Since McEneaney’s subject is autobiography, her residencies have gone on to constitute important imagery in her work.) There is a truth to the phenomena that grants-gotten seem to make artists appear more worthy for grant-getting.

    More profoundly, the Pew grants artists validation in their own eyes. Land artist Stacy Levy (1992) says that is was only after she became a Fellow that she stopped apologetically referring to herself as an “urban forester” and assumed the identity of artist. “I don’t know if I would have gotten there without the Pew,” she said. For two years, it covered the rent, the phone bill, and a small salary for Levy to think of her projects professionally. Up to that point, she had considered them, as many artists do, moonlighting—the work one does in the evenings, after coming home from a respectable (i.e., paying) day-job. “At the end of two years, I was sad to see the Pew go, but it had given me the time to build my work into an everyday practice—a practice which I had also had the time to develop into the creed that still guides me to make natural processes more apparent.”

    Artists for whom it was not their first major grant also spoke of having been validated by the Pew. Earlier in his career, the   Emmet Gowin (1994) had received major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. “But at that time, I was always so concerned to get something done.” With a young family and a teaching job, he made his art during the summers, traveling locally for places to photograph. “I did take a semester off with the Guggenheim. But a lot of tension comes with these circumstances. And that’s what was so vivid about the Pew.” After 22 years of teaching, he could take a year off for undivided work. Gowin used the year to bring to completion “Changing the Earth,” a body of work that started in 1986 and which culminated in 1997, where he became the first individual to make aerial photographs of the Nevada Test Site. He attributes the Pew, among other affiliations, with gaining him access to the Department of Energy: “Suddenly, you’re seen not just as a person,” he said somewhat laughingly, “you’re a ‘deserving entity,’ dignified by this lovely foundation, in a way that’s common in the sciences, but almost unheard of in the arts.” He also used the time to travel with no particular purpose to Australia and Indonesia. “To create something truly new, you can’t know what you’re doing. It has to be a process of discovery.” Nine years later, Gowin says the spirit of the Pew, which freed him from so much responsibility and opened up future work, remains with him today.

    When asked if the Pew is different from other grants, the answer was affirmative and unanimous. It’s one of the only grants in existence that comes completely unrestricted. Especially since the NEA disassembled, it’s almost impossible for an artist to receive a grant without strings attached. Residencies can provide a welcome break, if you are in the position to cake them, but they rarely come with living stipends. As Levy notes, “It’s like there’s this infantilized view of artists as not having real world responsibilities, like a family, or a monthly mortgage to pay. That’s something I continually appreciate about the Pew—it allowed me to be an artist without becoming indentured to some outside initiative or single project.” This is something many artists commenced on, the degree to which the Pew was about facilitating their work, whether it meant spending the money on childcare or covering a medical emergency. Photographer Eileen Neff remembers thinking that if she ever got the Pew, she wouldn’t be one of those artists who spend it on just taking care of life’s everyday business. She would invest it in new equipment, and travel, or some other way of taking her work to a whole new place. “Then two major things happened. I was in a car accident and I got the Pew.” During a long period of recuperation, she said, “The grant gavę mę unexpected and extended time for my own thoughts. So that when I returned to the studio, I was prepared.” Neff arrived back at work already knowing that she couldn’t physically continue with the installations she had been constructing prior to the accident, but she was already thinking on a more discrete scale. So, in the end her work did change, but not in ways that she ever anticipated.

    In this most extreme account of “what did the Pew mean to you,” Neff said that it wasn’t just the money that sustained her, it was the honor of the fellowship itself. “Ella’s letter telling me that I had gotten the Pew included a very personal note—I’m sure everyone got one like it—but there was a sense that my fellowship really meant something to her and the community.” The poet Susan Stewart (1995) is another Fellow to comment on the humanity of the fellowship and its director, in her case Melissa Franklin, who currently heads the program, Stewart recalls it being such a surprise to get the grant, “Poets aren’t like visual artists, we don’t need many materials. But we do need time and my children were still small.” She says that Franklin encouraged her to use the grant to buy herself time to think, “The Pew is astute about the particular circumstances of Fellows’ lives. It’s very humane.” Stewart had received a Guggenheim in 1986 and was at the Getty as a fellow when she learned that she got the Pew. It, combined with a writing award from the Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund for a literary project, enabled her to take a year’s leave of absence from her teaching job at Temple University. During that time, she completed her book The Forest, started work on what would become a book of criticism, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, and drafted some of the earliest poems for her most recent book, Columbarium. “You always wonder what you will do next. The Pew was unlike other grants, less of an honorific, and more of a working grant. It let me complete one thing and move on to the next,” Stewart also commented that the grant complements the nature of being an artist in Philadelphia. “One of the virtues of being in a smaller, somewhat provincial, city is that you aren’t bound to the accelerated demands of the more commercial publishing that seems to dominate larger places, and so you can take the time to do more complex work.” According to this model, the large amount of money a Fellow receives is a reflection of the depth of culture one might contribute.

    By being unrestricted, the Pew enables process on every level. The filmmaker Louis Massiah (1994) was in the midst of making his documentary on W.E.B. Du Bois, when he became a Fellow. “It helped me stay above water when I would have been financially drowning in Du Bois. And it enabled me to shoot some smaller projects, some of which are still being edited.” One of these projects turned out to be the seed of one of Massiah’s current projects. The Tenants of Lenapehocking began with his desire to make a film that was completely personal in its conception. But what scared as a documentary about the North Philadelphia neighborhood where Massiah grew up, which he has called Lenapehocking—”The Lenape were part of the Algonquin Confederacy that settled Philadelphia, and ‘hocking’ is a Lenape word meaning ‘place of’ ‘”—eventually morphed into Precious Places, an oral history project about twenty of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods, produced in collaboration with Scribe Video Center. Each neighborhood is teamed with a humanities scholar and an independent filmmaker, creating twenty short films, due to be completed in July 2004.

    The composer Jennifer Higdon (1999) regards the Pew as “the doorway” to realizing her creative ambition. “It changed everything,” she said. Higdon was able to cut back on a fulltime teaching load at The Curtis Music Institute and buy a house, where she could set up her own publishing business. In the music world, the ability to print and bind your own scores is an invaluable asset. Not only did it give Higdon more financial control over her production, it freed up her time to think about creative work. “It altered my very relationship to work. I scared to write for instruments I had never written for, and to write much more in general.” She says the Pew also gave her time for that most essential ingredient in any artist’s production: the time to think. “The creative process takes a lot of time to ferment. To create bigger works, I learned, you need even bigger pieces of time for nothing but the time to be inspired.” During her fellowship, Higdon wrote her large orchestral work. When we spoke on the phone to conduct this interview, she was preparing for a day in a recording studio in Atlanta, one of the two cities to open their season with Higdon’s Concerto for Orchestra.

    Higdon knew how to use her time well, having grown up in a family of freelance artists. Thar discipline was part of her upbringing. For other artists, the Pew’s gift of time came with an unexpected challenge. The photographer Richard Torchia (1994) said, “We’re led to think that money is the great panacea of all an artist’s woes. As if all that stood between me and making my work was, say, $50,000. Then I got the Pew Fellowship, and realized what a pipedream!” Torchia quit his job, hit the studio, and had a crisis. “I realized that I had never cultivated the identity and routine of an artist. I had never gone to art school and suddenly I had all this unstructured time, with no previous experience of how difficult it is to generate energy day after day to make art. I found myself doing lots of errands! As the Pew checks kept coming and I saw that the transformation wasn’t happening as effectively as I’d hoped, I realized that it takes more than time and money to move to the next rung of being an artist.” This insight alone seems to have liberated him from the pressure to produce something definitive. Torchia spent the last months of his fellowship simply building up a body of work, which subsequently advanced his on-going project around the camera obscura. “The premise of the Pew,” he reflected, “is that artists lead the art world, but sometimes they get stuck and there are periods of not knowing where you’re going.” By making the grant un-conditional, the Pew allows artists to continue developing through their fallow periods—to experiment in the studio, to be productive or not—for whatever density of time it takes to build the connections to envision their next work of art.

    So what about failure? With its dedication to process, the Pew admits the potential that any work can end in failure. But what about an artist failing to realize his or her potential? Does the Pew give some artists a chance to recognize that they perhaps are not as talented, or as dedicated as they thought? Of course, I am stating this as a general observation: but going to the mat with your work can be a burden as well as a gift. A healthy artworld ecology allows both artists and artworks not to succeed. It must nurture failure. This is a paradox, which, for the Pew, Emmet Gowin sees with particular optimism: “Never think that a person does not deserve, because the fellowship can make them deserving. If you blow a Guggenheim, which comes with so much pressure and national prestige, you might never do anything again. The localness of the Pew means a chance to see what you’re made of. The Pew operates in a very special way.”

    All of the Fellows I spoke to hold the Pew in special regard for the sense of community it inspires. “The most remarkable thing it does is make a community of local artists and writers. It’s not really institutional,” said Susan Stewart. It’s a concerted public and social effort. There is an annual ceremony to welcome the year’s new fellows and the publication of a catalog, like this one, to represent their work, which is contextualized in a commissioned essay by an outside writer. Outside the official hoopla, there are occasional dinners to bring together any of the years’ Fellows who wish to attend. This year saw the first newsletter, slated to come out biannually to cover local culture, profile individuals, and post news of Fellows’ publications, performances, and exhibitions. The recent issue featured an essay on the organization “One Book, One Philadelphia” and their selection of a novel by Lorene Cary (1995), entitled The Price of a Child for citywide reading; an interview with painter Stuart Netsky (1995); and a memorial for ceramicist Rudolf Staffel (1996) who recently died at the age of ninety-one. The writers were voices from throughout the community, from critic Gerard Brown, to PEI director Paula Marincola, to dealer Helen Drutt-English. Their participation, along the tracking of Fellows into the artworld at large, extends an interest in the Pew’s impact beyond its immediate pool into the local ecology and beyond.

    Fellows expressed gratitude to the Pew for expanding their awareness of Philadelphia culture. At one of the informal dinners Susan Stewart met the artist Neysa Grassi (1995) resulting in a poet/painter collaboration. “It was through getting to know a larger community of artists that I got more deeply involved in writing about art,” said Stewart. Jennifer Higdon said she now attends more art exhibitions in Philadelphia. Speaking of the Louis Kahn syndrome—one of the world’s eminent architects, Kahn’s work went under-recognized in his hometown—Louis Massiah observed, “Philadelphia is a funny place. Lots of artists here do better nationally than locally. It really means a lot to be recognized by your local community. Not that I, as an artist, consider the Pew my neighbor: it’s part of the power elite. But it also is one of the most important gatekeepers in the city. It opens doors locally and nationally. As one of the visionaries at the Fellowship program, Ella King Torrey got that about community art scenes: when art happening outside of patronized, market-driven places is sanctioned by the elite, it strengthens the entire community.”

    Getting an outsider’s perspective can be another community strengthener. This is where the panelists, who are convened from all over the country to represent their fields, come into the picture. Every year three different disciplines—including choreography, crafts, fiction and creative nonfiction, folk and traditional arts, media arts, music composition, painting, performance art, poetry, scriptworks, sculpture and installation, and works on paper—are up for consideration. Applications are reviewed in a two-step selection process. First, three single-discipline panels meer for 2-3 days, to winnow their pool to a short-list. These go before an interdisciplinary panel of 5-6 people and one chair that takes another 3 days to select 12 new fellows. When asked if the Pew differed from other panels, the answer was, perhaps not surprisingly at this point, a resounding yes. The composer and co-artistic director of Bang on a Can, Julia Wolfe confided, “I don’t always love panels, but this was fun. It’s very rewarding to give this kind of money, with no strings attached, to an individual artist. The Pew hasn’t backed away from that kind of commitment.” Wolfe also commenced on the caliber of her co-panelists, including colleagues she rarely got to see, let alone exchange ideas with. The composer, trombonist, and MacArthur fellow George Lewis said he found the interdisciplinary panel most informative, “A good panel is about good process, which in my field is about listening. It was very enlightening to learn what constituted the issues in other disciplines by listening to my peers.” Levis attributed the quality of the conversation to the Pew’s selection of panelists who were already open to an expanded notion of the arts. “The chemistry was excellent,” he said. Wolfe also appreciated the panel’s direction, “We had a lot of music to listen to, but it was paced such that we never got too fuzzy.” And it wasn’t just about knowing when to break for lunch, or open a window; panelists said the acumen of the staff about the various disciplines and how they are experienced was appreciable.

    Don’t think that being a panelist, even for the Pew, is all fun and games. It’s also a grueling process that involves being yanked away from one’s own work (and life) for a period of days to go to a strange city and hang out with people you don’t know. The artist Kiki Smith told director Melissa Franklin that she basically hated having to leave her studio to spend time anywhere being locked up in a dark room looking at slides all day, but that she considered this part of her job as an artist: a way of giving back to the system that has been so supportive of her own work. In other words, performing the responsibilities of being a panelist is part of the ecology of the artworld. Bringing in outsiders who are renowned in their fields, lends prestige to the whole community. Especially if panelists take away a rewarding experience from the review process and a good impression of the work itself. And what about the work? Wolfe said that, as a festival director, she listens to a lot of music from all over the country. “None of the artists whose work we reviewed were particularly established, but as a panelist I was behind all of those who received the fellowship one hundred percent. They deserved their awards.”

    George Lewis, who has received and judged the CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, which grants $50,000 to individual artists, said that he took the responsibility of selecting the Pew Fellowships quite personally. “The award is announced with your name on it. You gave your imprimatur, which makes you, in some ways, an ambassador.” Whether or not a panelist will go on to promote an artist they supported through the review process depends on the individuals involved. Having served on many panels myself (though not on the Pew), I can’t say that I am looking to discover new work, but to gain a better awareness of what’s going on in a region. Generally speaking, it takes an artist more than winning a grant for their reputation to move outside the local ecology. Nonetheless, a grant might be just the validation an artist needs to take their work to another place.

    In ecology, you learn that too much sunshine can be a bad thing—the duckweed goes into hyper-photosynthesis and chokes the pond. Or, that all that heat can produce a drought. In the ecology of the artworld of Philadelphia, is the Pew too rich a food for too small a system? There’s an unspoken anxiety about who gets the Pew. Artists have to prove their residency in the Philadelphia region for at least two years before they can apply. (The region is designated as the five-county Philadelphia area including Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties). There are no laws to prohibit you from instantly absconding upon completing your Fellowship; you won’t be arrested crossing the border. But when an artist does take the money and run, there is a sense of local violation. After all, this grant is intended to enrich culture in Philadelphia, not Los Angeles—if that’s where a Fellow chooses to go. And yet, a closed system risks becoming a stagnating system. As Richard Torchia observed, “Every art world has its constellation of stars. The thing is, they shouldn’t become too fixed.” More than one Fellow expressed concern that the Pew Fellowship pool was pretty close to full with all of the available talent. Several suggested that it could support artists at various points in their careers, and encourage their continuing achievement, in the same way that the Guggenheim Foundation does, by allowing Fellows to receive the grant more than once. Another trepidatiously floated the idea of opening up the fellowship to New Jersey. The prospect of the grant going national was roundly dismissed for transforming something unique in its specificity into yet another big prize for big names. Far better that the Pew serve as a template for other regions to enrich their local ecologies. I personally advocate allowing those who may not live here, but who teach in the Philadelphia region to apply. They are already contributing to the ecology; why not acknowledge their membership in the community? For the artist and teacher Joseph Beuys, art was a communicative property, a form of energy that failed if it did not flow. If the Pew creates incentive for artists to circulate through Philadelphia, it also fuels the art world as a whole. An artist who participates in, and is supported by the local culture goes out into the world as a connection back to that community.

    In his captivating book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, the poet Lewis Hyde presents a model of creative culture based not on ecology, but on economy. Nor is it a cash economy of buying and selling, granting and getting. The book harks back to fairytales (in which a simple act of giving can be all that stands between lifelong happiness and a fate worse than death) and potlatch rituals (in which the sanctity of whole societies depend on how much stuff they can afford to give away, or burn). It shows economies in which the receipt and giving of gifts, along with the gratitude gifts inspire, are deemed valuable in their own right. In this economy, a gift can be a thing (the last piece of bread given to a beggar, a pile of a thousand blankets tossed into the sea), or a talent (a genius, the gift of imagination). But it is the artistic gift that holds special place, because it is by definition not a commodity. It circulates outside the marketplace, and thus to receive it means stepping outside the system of exchange (and profit) that otherwise increasingly dominates every other aspect of our lives:

    That art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price… We feel fortunate, even redeemed. The daily commerce of our lives—”sugar for sugar and salt for sale” as the blues singers say—proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift revives the soul. When we are moved by a work of art we are grateful that the artist lived, graceful that he labored in the service of his gifts.”[footnote=4]

    Hyde’s economy implies that the true impact of the Pew Fellowships in the Arts is that it too, circulates as a gift. A gift to the artists who receive it and whose own gifts are ostensibly made stronger, more accessible by the opportunity to work (hard) at the labor of cultivating and developing talent. A gift to the culture that is enriched by the artist’s gifts. And finally, a gift to the Fellowship itself, which is made all the more affluent by its ability to give generously, and with no strings attached, to the entire ecology of the artworld.

  • “Dear Reader, On Jane Hammond’s Collaboration with John Ashbery” Jane Hammond The John Ashbery Collaboration, 1993-2001 Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 2001, pp. 11-17.

    Dear Reader,

    On Jane Hammond’s Collaboration with John Ashbery

     

    Here are a few selections from Jane Hammond’s overloaded bookshelves:

    The Introduction to                               The Young Folks’ Encyclopedia

    Solids Phrenology                                  of Common Things

    A Practice Guide to Your Head           The Encyclopedia of Needlework

    Houdini on Magic                                  The Polar and Tropical Worlds

    The Hiawatha Primer Lands               Zig-Zag Journeys in the Classical

    Games of American Indians                Storage Batteries Simplified

    Everybody’s Marionette Book             Grow Your Own Fruit

    Swimming the American Crawl                          

     

    Fresh from the antiquarian book fair, a beautifully printed series on Japanese culture—from Bunraku to Sumo spills out of a package onto the floor. Hammond’s collection includes plenty of art books, of course: Indian Court Painting, Kurt Schwitters, Jess, Life with Picasso, Mimbres Pottery. Monographs on Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo are prominent, too. More representative, however, are Hammond’s twenty books on beekeeping, though this topic might seem irrelevant to being a painter in Manhattan. The bee books are exemplary of the many titles on Hammond’s shelves that exude “bookish capacity,” the air of being ready to convey definitive knowledge and offer authoritative instruction on any elected topic-taxidermy, say. It’s a dated conceit, this compact authoritativeness, so there are many dark cloth bindings that glitter with gold lettering. Such ornamentation befits that golden age of popular publishing that erupted in the nineteenth century with the serialized novel and reached its zenith during the 1950s with series for young folk, for girls, for boys, for everybody. The most succinct expression of bookish capacity is the encyclopedia, and Hammond’s library abounds with the single-volume sort. The dearth of new paperbacks and shiny dust jackets is a sign that the era that Hammond’s library celebrates is over. Less cocksure, today’s nonfiction book is an authored text limited and shaped by social, political, and cultural forces that are all subject to question and critique. In the meantime, the encyclopedia has been eclipsed by the Internet–a wonderful tool, incidentally, for buying old books.

    The heaps of books Hammond owns have little to do with historical or contemporary art per se, but a lot do with her own art. The collaboration with poet John Ashbery that is the subject of this exhibition only underscores the fact that Jane Hammond’s encyclopedic, poetic, capacious, Postmodern paintings are very much about books and reading.

    Take Long-Haired Avatar (1995), with its typical construction: a collage of disparate images painted in oil on top of another collage made of images printed on paper and stuck to the canvas. In terms of first impressions, the painted part of the picture is strong and graphic (a quick read) compared to the printed matter, which is barely legible, almost painterly (a slow read). The figure at the center of the composition, with tresses flowing, clues us to the source of this composition: Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485). As expected (given this origin), a long-locked attendant rushes in from the right. But to the left, instead of the entwined male and female manifestations of wind and breeze that wafted Venus to shore there is a gigantic hennaed hand emerging from a tornado of white paint.

    This disruptive hand actually fits harmoniously with the welter of images of cosmologies, apparitions, and associations that ricochet off the words in the work’s title, the images in Botticelli’s painting, and each other. It helps to know that the word avatar, meaning a remarkably complete manifestation of a person or idea, comes from Hindu legend. (And, incidentally, the image of the hand comes from a booklet of henna designs that a friend of the artist brought back from India.) The avatara is one of the incarnations of Vishnu in animal or human form in each of the great cycles of time. The rabbit puppet popping into view holding a wire globe with a bird inside might be a variation on this there. Further research discovers that the little candle perched on the edge of the goddess’s clamshell may signify a paternal phallus: Venus was conceived when her father’s severed genitals were tossed into the sea. Did I mention that Venus is wearing an Iroquois mask? Still, what is she an avatar of? Is she the very embodiment of the artist, whose longish hair is also blond? Or perhaps of one of Picasso’s ferocious Demoiselles D’Avignon-yet another nude behind a tribal mask? Or maybe all of the above: goddess, artist, whore? You see where these readings are leading: everywhere at once and nowhere in particular, but always deeper into the painting, which has all the pictorial depth of a stage set. Indeed, a row of little stages is lined up accordion-fashion along the bottom edge of the canvas. Out of the flatness of Hammond’s painted proscenium a magician’s hand thrusts; a deck of cards tumbles from inside his sleeve. Never withholding, Hammond shows that her work is nothing but artifice, a fiction full of tricks and games. Indeed, she’s quite generous in revealing her strategies, which brings us back to the books on her shelves.

    The images in Hammond’s art look like illustrations clipped from the books she collects, and indeed these do provide source material for her art-that book about Houdini, for instance. But more than this, Hammond’s books create the same illusion that her paintings create and undermine. One gets the idea from her picture-glutted canvases that they contain every known thing, from avatars to zeppelins. But just the opposite is true. Hammond came to art in the early 1970s, having attended a liberal arts college where she studied sculpture and science and honed her sense for structures and systems. Yet in that heyday of minimal and conceptual art, her eye was for the pictorial. How to reconcile these internal and external forces? Hammond’s solution, based on over a decade of work, was to set herself rules within which she could make paintings: two sizes of canvas, six colors, and 276 images to choose from and combine. The images are numbered and the numbers, cited in strings, provided Hammond with a way of titling these works.

    Hammond’s resourcefulness is reminiscent of that of Lady Murasaki Shikibu, another woman who retaliated against a restrictive (and masculine) clime with imaginative invention. To battle the boredom of her life in the royal Japanese court, Lady Murasaki wrote her first novel circa 1010. The Tale of Genji gave Shikibu something to write; Jane Hammond’s rules give her something to paint.

    Hammond arrived at her system in step with the arrival of postmodernism, and it is in keeping with that movement’s tenets. Postmodernism made reading the appropriate form of engagement for those strategies that informed the new art of the 1980s: appropriation, mediation of signs, the deconstruction of pictures as texts. This new art included, by the way, a noticeable increase in painting. Hammond’s use of appropriation (all 276 of her images are reproductions) certainly contributes to the making of a lexicon in which each image functions like a word. And also like words, the meanings of these images mutate depending on what surrounds them. But compared to the postmodernism of, for instance, David Salle, Hammond offers a generous alternative. Instead of using pictorial quotes to cancel out the possibility of making something new (thus flagging the emptiness of all visual signs, including words), Hammond’s work embraces the artist’s capacity for making meaning, or meanings, even if they are fugitive or absurd. Following Hammond’s constructive approach, if you find yourself lost in the forest of signs, why not practice a little woodcraft? (See Woodcraft-on Hammond’s shelf.)

    Although many of the titles of the works in this exhibition sound as if they were copied off the spines of the books in Jane Hammond’s library, they were all produced according to another rule: she invited poet John Ashbery to compose a list of titles for her to paint. Hammond has long-standing relationships with several poets who, like Ashbery, have also written extensively on the visual arts. Her intrigue with poetry began with the villanelle, a French form that she learned about at a reading by the poet and art writer John Yau (the two were later married for a number of years). It is easy to imagine the appeal that this rhyming structure, based on an intricate pattern of repeating lines, would have for Hammond, who was just beginning to make paintings based on the repetition of elements. Another complex structure preoccupies Hammond in the book collaboration she is now working on with the poet Raphael Rubinstein. Rubinstein is an editor at Art in America magazine and an aficionado of the French Oulipo movement of poets, which in the 1960s began to explore a literature of arbitrary constraints. Georges Perec, one of its founders, wrote an entire novel without using the letter “e.” One of Rubinstein’s poems for his collaboration with Hammond is written in a form of his own devising: eight stanzas of eight lines of eight words with eight letters. Pronouns are off-limits, and … you begin to grasp the difficulty.

    Ashbery, one of the leading figures in the New York School of poets that emerged during the 1950s, was for many years a contributing art critic for the Paris Tribune and the editor of ArtNews. In a brief introduction for a 1990 exhibition of Hammond’s art, he appreciated those qualities in her paintings that “leave us with … the sense of a ritual performed, of a change signaled, of exchanges of various kinds including sexual and alchemical ones, of a page being turned.” But even barring all this background, and going simply by the forty-four titles Ashbery presented to Hammond in June 1993, the attraction is evident. Like Hammond, Ashbery’s medium is collage. Put your ear to a few of his titles and you hear the slices of everyday speech and found phraseology in The National Cigar Dormitory, Dumb Show, The Friendly Sea, Prevents Furring, and No One Can Win at the Hurricane Bar. In one of the paintings born from this collaboration, Pumpkin Soup II, Hammond has lovingly joined Ashbery’s portrait with hers; their faces are framed on the credenza, a pair of doting parents.

    Collage, one of the defining techniques of Modernism, goes hand in hand with books. James Joyce’s Ulysses would not be a modern classic without all the texts collaged into it from quotidian life. The artist Joseph Cornell’s library was so significant that when the National Museum of American Art inherited the contents of his studio, they took all his books, too. Early Modernism includes several collage collaborations between artists and writers, precedents for the work by Ashbery and Hammond. Two in particular will enhance our reading. First, a Russian example: In 1923, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky presented his friend, the artist Aleksandr Rodchenko, with a poem to illustrate. Titled Pro Eto, or “About This,” the poem was an incantation, an attempt by Mayakovsky to hold on to the disruption and havoc of his love for Lili Brik before it subsided into comfortable habit. Its imagery jumped from telephone to troglodyte, from domesticity’s mare to ice floe, in a stream-of-consciousness style that seemed specially minted for the technique of photocollage that Rodchenko was then practicing. By cutting, splicing, and gluing down everyday images, images of things that could never come together in reality, the artist manifested that shock which the poet longed to savor (and which for these members of the Russian avant-garde also signified the exciting rupture of revolution). The shock is greatest at those non-seamless moments when different kinds of reproductions collide and one becomes aware of all the corpses of photographs, of magazines, of advertisements, that have been dismembered and discarded to make this one image.

    What’s interesting about Pro Eto is its relationship to photography, another modern medium and one that haunts not only Jane Hammond’s collages but all collage. Soon after completing his collaboration with Mayakovsky, Rodchenko bought a camera and learned photography, primarily for purposes of enlarging and reduction. It was a short step to taking his own pictures. Hammond’s work has its own practical relationship to photography. Not one to be hacking up her library, she relies on photocopying, projectors, and other photographic means. Concerns over archival issues—which are bound to be immediate for anyone who relies on a picture archive for their work—have led her to develop a technique for making color reproductions that will not be subject to the inherent vices of commercial printing. Hammond’s use of collage is also conceptually related to photography-doubly so. For what do photographers do when they look through the lenses of their cameras? They edit and crop; they cut pictures out of the world at large, just like an artist working in collage. Thus, while the photographic nature of collage once prompted modernist Rodchenko to go out and create new pictures, it now keeps postmodernist Hammond busily reproducing and creating fresh readings of the pictures she already has.

    Perhaps it comes with working from a pool of 276 images, or from her processes of reproduction, but Hammond’s collage does not have the shock and schism of Rodchenko’s. Searching art history for an early sensibility similar to hers, my hand lingers over a row of Max Ernst’s collage books, including A Hundred Headless Woman (1927–29). Based entirely on engravings, Ernst’s work also has a kind of seamlessness, but I find it slightly hysterical and too nightmarish to make a good comparison to Hammond’s work, so I reach for What a Life! instead. This 1911 collage collaboration between two British satirists, the verbal E. V. Lucas and the visual George Morrow, is a fictional biography based on pictures clipped from a mail-order catalog and collaged into illustrations. As printed matter from the great era of popular publishing, the images are dead ringers for the kind Jane Hammond uses in her work. In praise of this material, the authors’ preface intones: “As adventures are to the adventurous, so is romance to the romantic. One man searching the pages of Whiteley’s General Catalogue will find only facts and prices; another will find what we think we have found a deeply-moving human drama.” Indeed, when the anonymous subject of the book claims to have known “slightly Sir Algernon Slack, the millionaire, whose peculiarity it was never to carry an umbrella,” and the accompanying picture shows a figure in deep-sea diving suit, complete with diving bell, this reader is moved (to laughter).

    My copy of What a Life! is a 1975 reprint with a foreword by none other than John Ashbery, who asserts, “What a Life! is a very funny book and deserves a niche in the pantheon of British nonsense. It also has a certain place in the history of modern art … ” Terry Gilliam’s collage animation for Monty Python’s Flying Circus could be counted among its progeny. In its own day, the book was possibly known to Dadaists, including Ernst. By 1936, it had earned itself a place in The Museum of Modern Art’s Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition in New York. The Surrealists would have been charmed and charged by the attack What a Life! made on bourgeois reality using nothing but scissors, junk mail, and humor. The fact that it took the form of a book would have made it especially appealing, for Surrealism, originally a literary movement, has always been as much about poetry as about painting. This means that no matter how arcane or absurd, silly or strange, abstract or inarticulate a given text might be-be it words or a picture—the reader is compelled to make some sense of it. Proving this logic-defying principle sparked the Surrealists in their pursuit of chance encounters, games, collaborations, and collage; what better way to catch up with the workings of the unconscious mind or, better still, the ineffable?

    There is much of Surrealism-its traditions, its activities, its aesthetic, its laughter-to be found in the works of both Jane Hammond and John Ashbery. But in this discussion’s terms, it’s the literalness of Surrealism-the surrealist compulsion to make things legible no matter how fantastic–that makes the Ashbery-Hammond collage collaboration tick.

    From the list of forty-four titles Ashbery scripted for her, Hammond has been able to make more of some than others. For example, to date she has yet to turn Contra-Zed into a single painting, but she’s made at least one work for almost every other title, including two Pumpkin Soups, three Sore Models, and five Irregular Plurals. Hammond says she never anticipated that her vow to see the list through to the end-to make each of Ashbery’s tides legible in her own visual terms–would occupy eight years of her life. In the meantime, she has broken (or evolved) most of the rules she first set for herself. Her original, limited kit of colors has grown to a fully-fledged palette of every hue and shade. The language of her painting has grown increasingly complex and present for its own sake: The Mush Stage (2001) features a beautifully icy passage of abstraction. The introduction of the printed paper collage elements (reproducing hosts of new images) lends the 276-picture lexicon greater nuance. And the overall matrix of media, pictorial space, pictures, and background have become more densely intermingled. It’s as if all the thinking that has gone into Ashbery’s forty-four titles simply keeps increasing the artist’s capacity for reading them on different levels or in different ways. When we encounter a hennaed hand plucking at the void in Irregular Plural #5, we already know it to be an avatar. To understand what an avatar of is, however, we must surrender our former understanding to an entirely new context. This one has to do with pairs of images that are the same but different: another hand in the picture floats on a little television screen. Other things that seem to want to go together here are the heads of two bald men (Picasso and Ghandi), the phrases “Egyptian Water Box” and “Siberian Chain Escape,” a wish-bone and a wish-bone-shaped length of rope. Framed by an open book, none of the elements of these pairs is literally on the same page. At the same time the painting (and title) insist that we read them together and adjust our sense of meaning accordingly. Oh, absolutely, these are irregular plurals.

    The Ashbery list did bring about one spontaneous change in Hammond’s work. Whereas for years she had used exactly two shapes of canvas-a square and a rectangle-Sore Models I (1993) is a diptych painted on two supports shaped like a pair of feet. After this, there seems to have been no turning back. Shaped canvases appear the rule, not the exception, within the Ashbery group, which also features a number of multi-part pictures. There are paintings shaped like maps, like houses, like plates, like games, like open books. And though we commonly think of closed books as being squares and rectangles, like conventional paintings, this hasn’t always been the case. Not all texts are uniform lines of print that read from left to right. There are scrolls and tablets, snakes and ladders, even human bodies to contend with in the history of reading and books. Peter Greenaway’s film The Pillow Book, named after a great work of early Japanese literature, tells the story of a contemporary female author who turns her lover’s living body into a written page. The manuscript drives her publisher to distraction; he has the young man flayed and turns the printed skin into a book-a terribly unique edition. Hammond, for a new print she is making outside the Ashbery collaboration, becomes a page in her own lexicon. A selection of her icons appears stamped onto her nude body, digitally photographed from behind. The almost life-sized sheet of Gampi paper on which the image is printed may be tissue-thin, but its fibers show it to be as strong and supple as skin. And in the Ashbery project, the slightly irregular cut of the edges of one of the 20 elements in the painting Do Husbands Matter? references vellum, the leather material of choice for manuscript illumination.

    From their very outline, Hammond’s shaped canvases reinforce the iconic nature of her paintings and her works’ desire to be read pictorially. Such talk of symbols and symbolism smacks of medieval times, but it’s the notion of the icon that ultimately takes Hammond’s use of the collage technique most firmly into the present, and possibly beyond. Computers have put a fresh spin on the established conventions of reading. Icons prompt ways of visually enhancing our reading with new fonts, formats, images, colors. We scroll up and down through screens of text; we cut and paste with abandon. Think of Hammond as having downloaded her 276 images into a database; suddenly, her painting system becomes a program for processing an ever-expanding web of information.

    Having almost run through the John Ashbery collaboration, Hammond is sure to generate many new applications for her collage and, with them, many new readings.

     

    (I would like to thank Geoffrey Batchen for reading this manuscript and for his expert input.)

     

  • “Curator’s Statement” Gloria: Another Look at Feminist Art of the 1970s. New York: White Columns, 2002.

    Another Look at Feminist Art of the 1970s

    Curator’s Statement

     

    This exhibition participates in a larger reappraisal now taking place through exhibitions, publications, and scholarship devoted to the feminist decade.[footnote=1] However, rather than attempt a historical survey, Gloria: Another Look at Feminist Art of the 1970s focuses on media-and performance-based works in order to distill a radical operative essence that transmits fully across the decade and to today.

    To young practitioners, looking back thirty years, ostensibly at one’s parents, the issues and icons of feminist art may seem remote-or worse, ridiculous. An ironic state of affairs given the currency of art constructed around images of female identity, female sexuality, femininity, and traditionally feminine pursuits, such as fashion and the decorative arts. Shortly after filling the main floor of the Guggenheim Museum with phalanxes of whippet-thin young women dressed only in high-heels and bikini parts (wardrobe by Tom Ford for Gucci, the brochure announced). Vanessa Beecroft sat on a panel discussion, subtitled “Whatever Happened to the Women Artist’s Movement.” Among the youngest by a generation at a table where also sat feminist luminaries Nancy Spero and Mary Kelly, Beecroft casually denounced her own mother as a communist, feminist, vegetarian, and everything.”[footnote=2]

    Removing her practice from the panel’s purview, Beecroft’s spectacular Guggenheim triumph seemed Feminism’s bitter failure. Likewise, a New York Times article that appeared around the same time. “The Artist is a Glamour Puss” equated the success enjoyed by a bevy of hot young women artists with their stylish beauty and ability to exploit their own sexuality.[footnote=3] “Women today are much smarter. We get pleasure from

    looking sexy,” said Katy Grannan, who pays women to be photographed in self-elected poses, usually nude. Interviewed at the opening of Another Girl, Another Planet, Grannan was one of the dozen artists-all of whom looked “as great as actresses at a premiere”-in this group exhibition of photographs of women by women. Another artist at the opening, was Cindy Sherman, whose mediated self-portrait photographs and commercial success make her a role model. When asked to comment on her protégés’ “Madonna School of Feminism”, Sherman confided, “There’s something uninformed about it that is creepy and scary to me.”

    Cut to Gloria at White Columns. Named for diverse figures within popular culture in the 1970s-Gloria Steinem (the founder of Ms. Magazine and former Playboy Bunny); Gloria Stivik (the outspoken liberal daughter of bigoted Archie Bunker in the television series All in the Family): the role played by Gena Rowlands in Gloria, the 1970 movie by John Cassavettes; and the Van Morrison song as performed by Patti Smith-this exhibition was conceived in direct response to both of Beecroft’s performances (at the Guggenheim and on that panel discussion) and the Glamour Puss phenomenon. Our aim was to reintroduce the efforts of pioneering artists whose influence was apparently being taken for granted, or worse, entirely written off, and to reclaim the sense of empowerment and agency that many young women now seem to enjoy as a direct legacy of feminism. At its most basic, Gloria set out to establish some parity between then and now, by showing that the art of the period was (and remains) significant, vital, sexy.

    Gloria includes works by artists who emerged during the first wave of late 1960s feminism (Carolee Schneemann, VALIE EXPORT, Yoko Ono) as well as those who would catch the tail end of the second wave and ride it into the 1980s mainstream (Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman). As demonstrated by the range of work on view-from Mary Kelly’s photo-documentation of her son’s first bath to Nancy Grossman’s sculpture of a sadomasochistic leather mask-feminist art of the 1970s does not neatly coalesce along any singular formal, material, or conceptual lines. Artists were unified by their politics, implicit to which was a commitment to pluralism. The struggle for equality between the sexes meant no one would dominate. Indeed, this exhibition presents the diversity within relatively narrow strains of a movement that, at its fullest, encompassed art which is the very antithesis of the work on view. In electing to limit this survey, Gloria underscores what was common to all feminist artists, including those mining more traditional mediums, representational imagery, craft, symbolism, a female or feminine aesthetic: the activism in which they all participated.

    Seventies feminism grew directly out of sixties activism, as evidenced by the ephemera in this exhibition. The public actions and institutional interventions documented by these small press magazines and newsletters (as well as the very form and distribution of these publications) were based on the tactics prescribed by the New Left to advocate civil rights and protest the Vietnam War. These tactics were co-opted by women, many of whom were directly involved in these movements, and who learned their feminism through the frustration of being relegated to the administrative task forces (ie. doing the shit work) and not being admitted onto the front lines. Paradoxically, this experience seems to have equipped women artists with superpowers of organization to create the alternative exhibition spaces, slide registries, information networks, education initiatives, watch-dog committees, caucuses, coalitions, and general consciousness-raising that revolutionized feminist artists throughout the 1970s.

    It is interesting to contemplate a particular relationship between the activism of 70s feminism and the action-based works in this exhibition, works which also advance major paradigm shifts within contemporary art at large. In 1967. Lucy Lippard, feminist art’s great spokeswoman, coauthored with John Chandler “The Dematerialization of Art” in which they equated radical contemporary art with the political radicalism of the day and advanced emergent trends towards “serialism, analyses of process and procedure, and consciousness of context beyond conventional art spaces.”[footnote=4] Considered one of the launch pads of postmodernism and an opening salvo for the 1970s, the essay called for artists’ liberation from traditional studio practices and for art’s freedom from interpretation based on the object per se. Given that one of the most critical challenges faced by artist members of the Women’s Liberation Movement was to have their work considered equal to art by men, is it any wonder that feminists played such a key role in the conception and creation of action- text- and photo-based works, as well as video art? All were relatively new mediums, not canonized by old masters and with little at stake in the marketplace. They were significantly available to feminist expression.

    Gloria posits that it is through non-traditional mediums and actions that the feminist legacy is most fluidly expressed within contemporary art. An alternative trend that developed alongside the art of critique and social confrontation explored in Gloria, was the attempt to define an essential female iconography outside the boundaries of male culture. Almost by definition, the 70s separatist artist’s goal of developing a purely female voice undermined any effective contribution to cultural dialogue by its requirement of isolation from the mainstream, Witness the decline of women’s galleries, cooperatives, exhibitions, magazines and journals, which were so primary to the work of feminist artists, art historians and critics in the 1970s. This distancing from the dominant culture had the unfortunate repercussions of a lack of broader critical awareness and an often hostile perception of ghettoizing. Thirty years later, a certain disdain exists for exhibitions devoted to women artists, a sense that the reception of the work will suffer from being seen in an exclusively feminist context (though it should be noted that a larger political context is often accepted). While both choices-rejecting or confronting the mainstream-were radical acts, the decision to engage in evolving cultural discourses carried the cultural legacy of feminism beyond the Feminist Decade. As this exhibition demonstrates, the “F-word” applies to work that has had enormous impact and reflects an incredible range of creative and intellectual innovations.

    Despite the differences presented by the objects in this show (discussed individually in the annotated checklist), common themes and images emerge rife with currency. Take the theme of transformation. Starting in the 1970s, women artists turned the lady-like application of makeup and dress into an aggressive form of masquerade, to perform and invent new identities, from the super-feminine to the quasi-masculine. They represented themselves through the definitively male eyes and voice of the media to command its authority and retool its message. They staged objective views of their everyday lives to de-romanticize, demystify, and most importantly, politicize “women’s work. They confronted viewers with birth, menstruation, abortion and rape to show the viscerality of women’s lives. And they put their own sexuality on display for the purpose of enjoying their own pleasure and power at the risk of harassment and abuse.

    Over the course of organizing this show, a transformation in our own thinking took place. It occurred around a letter published in the December 1974 issue of Artforum. Written in response to the copyrighted advertisement of Lynda Benglis photographed by Arthur Gordon in the November 1974 issue, the letter was signed by a group of associate editors; Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff, Rosalind Krauss, Joseph Masheck and Annette Michelson. The group came down hard on the magazine for putting them in a compromising position-unless they took the moral high road and documented their disgust, they would be seen as complicit in the publication of the infamous image of the young, beautiful Benglis posing aggressively nude with an enormous double-headed dildo. Given the magazine’s “efforts to support the movement for women’s liberation,” they deemed the picture to be “therefore doubly shocking to encounter in its pages this gesture that reads as shabby mockery of the aims of that movement.” Read today, the prissiness of their response finds critics of contemporary art awkward in the role of moral authoritarians-particularly in light of another lefter on the same page, this one also from an Artforum contributor, Peter Plagens, who suggests “covering the offensive anatomy with a small Donald Judd inset.” As curators of Gloria, whose generation falls somewhere between the 70s and today, the irony of our own reaction to a presumed lack of feminism among artists today was not to be overlooked.

    In researching the seventies, we have been struck by how pervasive the presence of the women’s liberation movement was across culture, the extent of the activism and with what commitment women artists struggled to realize the goals of feminism. And while, compared to theirs, ours is not a moment of great political activism indeed, as Beecroft’s art evinces, ours is a culture of rampant consumption-it is not devoid of feminism. Magazines like Bitch and Bust are expanding on the tradition of Ms. Artsy was recently started in response to the lack of coverage for women artists in Artforum. Flipping through the pages of these magazines, we have been made newly aware of how complex the choices are for young women who are apparently well-versed in feminist theory, watch Sex in the City, subscribe to Martha Stewart Living and Vogue, and are thinking strategically not only about if, but about when, with whom, and how they want to have children. And while, the mainstream press has trivialized these women’s politics as “lipstick feminism,” in the process of working on Gloria, we have learned that the generation we set out to instruct is already highly well-informed.

    Provocation has some worthwhile results, this exhibition, for example. What started out as a reaction against a seemingly self-imposed political amnesia on the part of younger women artists developed into a greater awareness of the ongoing and increasingly complex pursuit of feminist goals in today’s world, thinking globally, feminism is more relevant than ever. As a defining feature of the West, feminism is, opposed by cultures in which women are not considered equal to men. However, even within the limited scope of this exhibition project, it has become abundantly clear that dividing the generations undermines the power that feminism has gathered over the last thirty years. Revisiting the work of some of the most compelling artists of the 1970s-the decade to which all subsequent feminist thought, action, and art inherently refers-we have come to see this exhibition not so much as a reminder, but rather as an affirmation of the feminist continuum.

     

  • “Curator’s Statement, Seeing Red” MICA, First Year Juried Show Baltimore, Maryland: Maryland Institute College of Art, Graduate Studies, 2015, pp. 6-7.

    Curator’s Statement

    Seeing Red

     

    If I was at MICA, I would spend a lot of time at Red Emma’s. A worker-owned cooperative, founded in 2003 in the wake of the closing of Baltimore’s volunteer-run anarchist bookshop Black Planet, Red Emma’s is a bookstore, coffee roaster, vegetarian restaurant, and community event space. What better way to ventilate the hothouse intensity of art school? The solitude of the studio, the pressure of crits and charettes, art school is a complex concatenation of inspirations and distractions. Keeping focused, being clear about the work, and simultaneously receptive to all that is there to inform it—art, politics, media, history in its most encompassing terms, yourself—is overwhelming. Especially if the art school is as well calibrated to the task of creating an environment of exchange across its degree programs as the Maryland Institute College of Art.

    Located just across the street from the graduate school, Red Emma’s offers handy escape and connection to the world outside the studio. You can get a cup of coffee, browse books, and even participate in democracy. A recent gathering hosted Tawanda Jones, the sister of Tyrone West, whose brutal murder two years ago was means for a frank conversation about the death this April of Freddie Gray, also at the hands of Baltimore police, about the riots and protest that ensued across the city, across the country, against systemic violence and racism towards blacks in America.

    I’ve punctuated every one of my recent trips to Baltimore with a visit to Red Emma’s. There was the field trip with colleagues from Philadelphia to see the installation of works by Palestinian artist Tysir Batniji that curator Liz Park organized at Lease Agreement, the gallery in a home operated by artists Adam Farcus and Allison Yasukawa with their cat Talk Radio. There was the afternoon at the American Visionary Art Museum—where I learned about the fine Baltimore tradition of painted window screens and experienced revelatory works by the Rev. Howard Finster, among many others—followed by a dash through The Walters Art Gallery to see the gold masked marten fur in Veronese’s portrait a Countess and the museum’s marvelous Chamber of Wonders. Then there was the day of stealth studio visits at MICA. As part of the selection process for this annual exhibition, which can be done purely online, I invited artists to open their studios to a visit from me on a day when no one was around. It was remarkable, the hum: even in silence, the school was animate with creative energy. [Plush] shark sculptures swimming overhead the multidisciplinary Mount Royal School of Art’s kitchenette lounge triggered my own appetite for yet another Classic Bánh Mì sandwich at Red Emma’s. Then it was back to the train station with a quick stop at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where the newly reopened façade is made all the more grand by the fact that entrance is free.

    Are artists supposed to change the world? Yes. Art that matters absolutely changes the way we see and imagine the world in which we live. This change can be spiritual, political, aesthetic. Great art, of course, is operative on every front, in ways that shift and evolve over years of contemplation and interpretation. For the student, however, it’s useful to bear these words in mind:

    “Radical” sums this up for us quite nicely; it’s a word derived from the Latin word for “root”, and to be “radical” is to go to the root of the problem, to not be afraid to attack root causes rather than be distracted by the symptoms on the surface.

    As relevant to Red Emma’s “experiment in self organized education,” these words from their website read as ready-made for the project of being an artist.

     

    With thanks to the participating artists for their work, for the words I abstracted from their statements, and for their answers to the question that illuminate this publication—Designed by Hieu Tran as his contribution to the exhibition

  • “The Unphotographable—Notes on Photography and Dust” Art On Paper. ed. Gabriella Fanning and Faye Hirsch. New York: Fanning Publishing Company Inc., 2002, pp. 58-63

    The Unphotographable

    Notes on photography and dust

    A pair of small hands motion in front of elevator doors, the hands both reflected and abstracted by the brushed aluminum surface. There are seven such black-and-white photographs, each mounted on a sheet of brushed aluminum, in Incantation, a series by Jennifer Bolande. Why are they so troubling? True, it’s a strange conceit, using incantatory gestures to open electronic doors, (The artist says she was looking to find a new form of “interface” with an everyday object.) Perhaps what’s unsettling is the reference to touch. The quintessential expression of postmodernism, photographs are not typically considered tactile objects. And yet here the hand is doubly implicated. The artist’s hands dissolve into the metal in the picture, enticing us to touch the metal of the frame, which has the mirror coolness of what one imagines photography to be. It’s a surface that, once touched, would be physically spoiled, like a photograph is by a fingerprint.

    Equally troubling is Gerhard Richter’s 128 Fotos von einem Bild (Halifax, 1978), from 1998. This portfolio of eight offset lithographs reproduces in black and white the 128 photographs Richter made of a colorful abstract painting for his Pictures exhibition held in Halifax in 1978. (The original set of photographs are in the Kaiser Wilhelını Museum, Krefeld, which published the recent prints. A sub-generation is the artist’s book 128 details from a picture, Halifax 1978, published by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1980.) This endless endgame of painting and reproduction has, since 1962, been a familiar strategy for Richter, who once reflected, “Suddenly, I noticed that the copying of photographs had more to do with painting than everything I had ever painted before …”[footnote=1] Indeed, just like the latest discovery scientists are bound to make of yet another infinitely tiny particle of matter and material measure, there’s something reassuring about this artist’s ability to parse another layer of imagery out of his own art. Our systems of representation continue to function and find interesting things to do.

    What is disturbing about 128 Fotos is the view it offers, or fails to offer. “The photographs were taken from various sides, from various angles, various distances and under different light conditions,” Richter has said.[footnote=2] Consequently, each frame in this Atlas-like grid reads as a picture in its own right; some resemble landscapes; others, weirdly blurred by the camera’s focus, make abstractions of abstraction. Still others appear as straightforward documents for a painting conservator: mug shots of brushstrokes. Throughout, there is a sense of mapping, of gathering and plotting information. Upon pulling back, the overall impression is of a terrain, but one that in no way resembles the original. This terrain has been deconstructed into a panorama of particles-particles of photography attempting to coalesce into painting. At this point, Richter’s work comes full circle. His abstract paintings always appear loaded and wet with the potential of the photographic image—they both look and feel like emulsion assaulted by a squeegee during the darkroom act of development.

    To write of particles is to speak of dust, or in this case, Dust Breeding (Elevage de poussière), which Richter’s 128 Fotos visually and conceptually resembles. For this collaborative work of 1920, Man Ray photographed Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass covered by several months’ accumulation of dust. Like Richter’s various views of his painting, Elevage de poussière shows a painting rendered invisible and pitched into relief by the particular. It also brings to mind Duchamp’s response to the question of photography. “Dear Stieglitz,” he wrote in a letter to America’s champion of the question, “Can a photograph have the significance of Art?” that was published in a 1922 issue of Manuscripts, which Stieglitz edited:

    Even a few words I don’t feel like writing. You know exactly what I think about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else would make photography unbearable.

    Affectuesement,

    Marcel Duchamp

    (Painter, Chess Expert, French Teacher, and Type Expert)

    Seen together, Bolande and Richter’s practices come close to fulfilling Duchamp’s wish. Photography, while perhaps not made unbearable by painting, can no longer be simply itself. Richter cannot make a painting without referring to photography (and vice versa).

    Photography, meanwhile, has taken on board the attributes of painting and, as encountered in Bolande’s work, sculpture: photography now has their surface, texture, abstraction, scale. Without the gigantic dimensions of French history painting, it would be impossible to explain Andreas Gursky’s recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Indeed, his photographic images, digitized into patterns that reproduce “reality” as museum wallpaper, make traditional photography an unbearable constraint. And yet, photography continues to be everywhere. Witness Camera Works: The Photographic Impulse in Contemporary Art, held at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York last summer. This show was packed from floor to ceiling with photographs by artişts ranging from Jessica Stockholder to Yoshitomo Nara.[footnote=3]

    At the same time, every medium is more than just a form of picture-making it has a specific set of identities, histories, physical characteristics, processes—in short, a culture. In this respect, the culture of photography has never been more pervasive. It is, among other things, the subject of The Photogenic: Photography through its Metaphors in Contemporary Art, a group exhibition that I curated at Philadelphia’s Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (through April 28)[footnote=4]. Comprising painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, sound, prints, and, yes, photographs, the works I selected for this exhibition all point to photography, which is made all the more present by the medium’s relative absence in the show. For example, sound artist Stephen Vitiello is creating a new site-specific work using a photocell—the device photographers use to test light—hooked up to a microphone. A computer translates the light vibrations into sound. He discovered this technique during a 1999 residency at the World Trade Center.[footnote=5] From the communal 91st- floor studio space, with its 360-degree views, what struck Vitiello was the 24hour symphony of lights: the natural light of the sun and the moon, rising and setting, subdued or amplified by weather, disappearing behind clouds; all the variations on artificial light from cars, apartments, the streets, architecture. He has made several light albums, including Bright and Dusty Things, which gets its “dirty” quality from the battery coming loose from the cell during recording.

    As seen, or heard, in the context of The Photogenic, Vitiello’s work presents a sonic version of photography’s earliest metaphors—light writing and photogenic drawing. Since the medium was first announced in 1839, photography and light have been deemed inseparable properties. Other characteristic metaphors for the photograph are proof, pencil of nature, index, the blind spot. All make appearances in the show. And while the exhibition seeks to use these metaphors in order to chart the expansion of photography’s culture into other mediums, here I would like to take an opposite if parallel approach, considering some of the photographic works in the ICA exhibition precisely in order to observe what it is about them that is not photography. In the case of Jennifer Bolande’s Incantations, what is not photography is haptic, and comes from the performative element that underlies all of her work. With Richter’s 128 Fotos, it’s the particularity of paint that gives his photography its substance (and vice versa). Brought into the picture from outside of the culture of photography, these qualities point to something that has permeated contemporary photography as much as photography has infiltrated contemporary art—a something I want to call the unphotographable. The unphotographable, too, is permeable and changes according to the artist who takes it on. The unphotographable is the pointer within the picture that beats a path out of photography at a moment when distinctions between all mediums have clearly collapsed.

    Let’s return to the dust. The place where it accumulates may be dirty, but is also rich with signs of the unphotographable.[footnote=6] Last May, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented The Things Themselves: Pictures of Dust, an exhibition by Vik Muniz based on a site-specific project he created in response to an invitation from the museum’s photography curator, Sylvia Wolf. Ever since reproducing icons of photography in chocolate sauce, Muniz has been known for his ambivalence toward a medium (photography, not candy) that is matched only by his intelligence when it comes to making pictures that dismantle (and maintain) photography’s illusions. For the Whitney project, he selected a group of historic installation photographs of Minimalist and Post-minimalist art from the museum archives. He reproduced these images as drawings using dust collected from the museum, which complied with his request for spent vacuum cleaner bags. Muniz then photographed and destroyed the drawings.

    As exhibited at the museum, the prints were enlarged to a scale that shows each more to be a piece of fuzzy or hairy filth. In these images, which photorealistically depict works by Donald Judd, Barry Le Va, and Robert Ryman, among others, Muniz has a field day with, among other things, the artist’s intervention as archaeology; the purity of Minimalism and the messiness of what followed; the sanitary sanctuary of the museum as institution and repository. But these are mere riffs compared to Muniz’s challenge to the mantra of modern photography, “the thing itself,” as coined by Edward Weston, who charged photography with no more or less of a mission than to record “the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.” Ricocheting non-stop between drawing and photography, reality and reproduction, dust and emulsion, Muniz’s pictures ultimately render unphotographable “the thing itself.”

    Man Ray and Duchamp conducted their collaboration in the studio, a place where ideas and materials accumulate into art and debris. Combining their efforts, Katurah Hutcheson is at once a photographer and a painter. Marked by blobs and stains, her monochromatic works read as abstractions, but they are actually representations of “the thing itself,” in this case her studio production. Hutcheson uses her studio as a camera to capture images of shadow and light. Its windows are the apertures whereby light enters, filtering through acetate sheets upon which random drips of paint have accumulated. These silhouettes are then recorded either photographically or on canvas. The paintings are “multiple exposures,” developed layer by layer, always with found materials: recycled and repaired canvases, cast-off cans and tubes of paint, and building over time a solid identity in painterly abstraction. As opposed to these images of duration, the related photographs are fleeting, with the unphotographable a constant by-product of Hutcheson’s weird, hybrid process. What’s more, there’s something sordid about it all—the corporeality of her paintings, the fluidity of the photographs—that speaks to the Duchampian moment when both mediums might suffer some collapse.

    Debris is the subject of a suite of four photographs by sculptor Rachel Whiteread entitled Furniture (1992–98). These are basically tourist snapshots of garbage day. Taken internationally, they show the sad street life of household objects. A mattress slumps against a car in Athens; another stands next to a wardrobe against a fence in London. The world grows that much smaller, more homogenized, bridged by the common wasteland of consumer culture. Cast onto curbsides on moving or garbage day, these objects, in Whiteread’s eyes, are both poignant and awful in their exposure to public view, surrogates, of sorts, of homeless men and women. But of course what one really sees in them are studies for Whiteread’s sculptures. Cast from just such household objects, these too are images of aggressive vulnerability, intimate memorials of contemporary life. I have often wondered what makes these somewhat abject works so effective, and what distinguishes them from the early works of Bruce Nauman, invariably cited in writing on Whiteread as a predecessor who cast the undersides of shelves and chairs in the 1960s. Her photographs answer the question, because they have made me understand the specific relationship that exists in her work between the positive and the negative: Whiteread’s art embodies a desire to be the thing that is not there.

    A similar line of questioning is raised by the work of Stephan Balkenhol, whose figurative sculptures carved from wood might seem more folkloric than contemporary. However, the artist’s recent foray into photography suggests ways in which all of his works are essentially postmodern snapshots in wood. Mounted on a large panel of pływood is a screenprinted photograph showing in enlarged detail the eye of one of Balkenhol’s sculptural figures. One can see clearly that the technique behind Balkenhol’s carving has nothing to do with carefully rendering an image. The close-up shows that his chisel moved quickly, chipping out details with the same rough strokes that shaped the entire form. Thinking of these strokes, one recognizes an echo of Roland Barthes’ recollection that “at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of wood.”[footnote=7] Thus Balkenhol’s photograph is more than a reproduction of his work. It is an image of something quite immaterial, quite unphotographable: the mechanical precision that underlies both his sculpture and photography.

    Perhaps the most compelling sign of collapse between photography and sculpture occurs in a recent body of work by the conceptual artist Karin Sander. Exhibited last spring in New York at D’Amelio Terras was a gallery of miniature plastic men and women, each elevated to eye level by a tall white pedestal. Posed casually and dressed in professional attire, these figures were depicted with such veracity that they appeared plucked out of a photograph of people networking at an exhibition opening. Indeed, as the titles revealed, many of those represented were members of the art world. There was a diminutive David Ross, now-former director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; a lilliputian Olivier Renaud-Clement, photography dealer; a peewee Werner Meyer, the curator whose invitation to participate in an exhibition of Kleinplastik (small sculpture) launched this body of work; and a “mini-me,” Karin Sander herself.[footnote=8] The series they are part of is called 1:10, which refers to their shift in scale—these sculptures are exactly one-tenth the size of their subjects—which Sander achieved with digital photography. Deploying a technology familiar to the fashion industry, a battery of cameras bounces light off a living person to produce a three-dimensional body scan. The measurements are then fed into a machine that translates them into crosssections, which are output as layer upon layer of sprayed plastic. The resulting sculpture is, in fact, a photograph. Several of these works recently entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—notably, by way of the department of photography.

    Harking back to Duchamp’s prediction, one wonders if the digital might be the “something else [that] would make photography unbearable.” This discussion certainly finds photography straining its bounds, falling in with other mediums and even returning to its experimental infancy. Just briefly note two of the artists in The Photogenic: Sheila Pepe, who has developed a drawing practice based on Surrealist automatism and photograms; and photogrammatician Adam Fuss, who has been using that most precise of techniques, the daguerreotype, to make images that are perversely blurry. It’s as if the presence of a new technology, and all the anxieties attending it, have shaken up the old one. In response, photography kicks up its heels and succumbs to collapse. It affirms its own historic identity (modern, experiential). And it (blindly) points the way toward the virtual by showing us that some things are simply unphotographable.

    The author would like to thank Dr. Geoffrey Batchen, whose writings on photography (most recently Each Wild Idea: Writing Photography History, Cambridge, 2001) and whose reading of a draft of this essay have been greatly informative.

  • “Getting Small with Louise Fishman.” Louise Fishman, ed. Helaine Posner. New York: Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College; Philadelphia: Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; Delmonico Books/Prestel, 2016, pp. 184-199.

    GETTING SMALL WITH LOUISE FISHMAN

    This conversation was held at Louise Fishman’s New York studio on June 29, 2015, in advance of the exhibition Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock that will be held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, April 29 -August 14, 2016.

    INGRID SCHAFFNER: The three essays in this book make meaty narrative of your major work, in part by drawing extensively on past interviews and conversations. That gives us permission to take this conversation off road, to poke around some lesser-known aspects of your painting, your Philadelphia roots, and your feminist and queer politics. Let’s follow the lead of the Institute of Contemporary Art exhibition. Conceived independently from – and running in tandem with – the Neuberger Museum of Art’s fifty-year survey, the ICA’s Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock will be more like a studio visit: a chance to see bodies of work that until now have been a mostly private part of your practice.

    The installation will present a selection of sketchbooks, miniature paintings, and small sculptures. Not much bigger than two by three inches, the miniatures are as completely realized as full-breadth canvases. The sculptures, some cast in bronze from plaster models, the bulk constructed largely from found objects, are so elemental in form and substance they appear almost geologic. And the books, which are filled with mediums and modes of mark making, burst with narrative drive like Amazon comics rendered abstract. There will also be some very early works, including a self-portrait as a blonde boxer.

    Though surprisingly unlike the large-scale, abstract and gestural paintings for which you are known, these small-scale paintings and sculptural objects are deeply telling distillations of the intimacy and intensity, emotion and physicality, you pack into all of your work. So, Louise, let’s get small.

    LOUISE FISHMAN: The gloves are off.

    INGRID: I want to start by focusing on your early feminist circle by way of a small painting: Angry Ti-Grace. From the Angry Paintings, that are as raw as screams on paper, this work is named for the radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson, who was also ICA’s unofficial first director. And from what I have researched of the museum’s founding history, Ti-Grace had plenty to be angry about! Working as an administrator in the Fine Arts department, she pretty much single-handedly organized ICA’s inaugural exhibition in 1963, the first museum survey of the work of Clyfford Still, a big boy of Abstract Expressionism and curmudgeon. He wrote threatening to cancel the show if the catalogue included Atkinson’s (very good) essay on his work, because he basically considered her a secretary. Indeed, it was only after she left the job that a full-time director was appointed, a man named Sam Green. Louise, how did you know Ti-Grace Atkinson and her anger?

    LOUISE: I didn’t know her personally, but she was the best spokesperson for the women’s movement and she was 100 percent behind the lesbians. Ti-Grace was the one who was teaching us, even though we presented her with the revolution. When she spoke, we got very quiet and really paid attention. We would go off to weekend meetings, seminars, whatever, and everyone would be screaming and yelling because there were all these factions in the women’s movement – the lesbians, the socialists, the conservative “feminists,” the woman-identified women. Everybody was having trouble. People were taking off their clothes. I remember Rita Mae Brown wandering around taking her shirt off – she was so gorgeous – and everybody was like oh, I wanna do that, but nobody else had that body.

    INGRID: It sounds like a very angry and ecstatic time. You’ve spoken about Jill Johnston – Angry Jill – in similar terms, as an orator for lesbians.

    LOUISE: It was a very powerful moment. We all knew we were revolutionaries in a way that had not happened in Western history. Jill and Ti-Grace were both outside of the fury of the movement, but they were the brains.

    Jill had a column in The Village Voice called “Dance Journal,” which I followed from the very beginning because I was interested in dance. When I first came to New York I accidentally walked into a concert by Yvonne Rainer and immediately fell in love with her, her dance, her ideas; she inspired me in every possible way. Jill originally was a dancer with José Limón’s studio, but she began writing dance criticism for the Voice in 1959. She wrote about Happenings when no one else was. Jill had the ability to touch everything and to say really interesting things. Then the language started shifting: no punctuation, all lowercase, she just started taking tremendous liberties. She became an artist. Everybody was fascinated. Then, of course, she came out in her column, the first person to do so in the media.

    INGRID: Jill’s archive is managed by her widow, Ingrid Nyeboe, to whom you have been married since 2012. Is there an emblematic “Angry Jill” for you?

    LOUISE: I met Jill at several of the little weekend conferences that a group of us who were involved in the movement had at a country house that Hill had bought. She was with Jane O’Wyatt at the time. It was New Year’s Eve and I was in a sleeping bag with Esther Newton. Esther had already written Mother Camp – the first book on drag queens – terrific book; she later wrote an anthropological study of Cherry Grove. We’re still friends. Her partner is Holly Hughes now. Back then, our relationship was on the rocks. Midnight came, everybody was excited. I reached over to kiss Esther and she moved her head away. POW! I hit her in the face with my fist. I don’t usually hit anybody, but it was New Year’s. Everybody kisses everybody. And Jill looked at me and said, “I knew there was more to this relationship than a VW bug,” which is what Esther drove.

    INGRID: It sounds like you shocked yourself, Angry Louise. Another woman from the series is the writer Bertha Harris. You are a character in her novel Lover.

    LOUISE: I was Lover. Bertha took an apartment so she could write her novel about having an affair with me in it. We were separated when the book was published, in 1976. Bertha had run off with Charlotte Bunch to Sagaris, the feminist/lesbian think tank. But later, when we were friends again and the book was republished by New York University Press as an important work of lesbian fiction, Bertha wrote a long dedication to me.

    INGRID: Angry women are passionate women.

    LOUISE: Oh my god, yes. But I was one of the few visual artists in a group of mostly academics and writers. They all kept journals, and I started keeping a journal because I wanted to write, too. The Angry Paintings come out of that desire, using language in a scribbling sort of way.

    INGRID: They also break an abstract painter’s taboo against words on canvas. There’s a strong narrative to the triumphantly feminist title of Victory Garden of the Amazon Queen, one of your abstract paintings on four small pieces of unstretched linen. It looks like a little quilt.

    LOUISE: The title refers to the Victory Gardens my parents’ generation grew during the war; that painting was in the 1973 Whitney Biennial. The first time Marcia Tucker came for a studio visit was in 1971, and I talked with her about being a lesbian and about my politics and feminism. Apparently I reduced her to tears. Marcia, who may have been going through her own political conversion, didn’t include me in the Biennial that year, but for the following Biennial she selected the Amazon Queen Paintings.

    INGRID: So, it was your victory.

    LOUISE: Using words and bringing narrative into the titles were attempts to communicate in a way that I felt abstract painting was not communicating to the women who were my closest allies and friends.

    At a certain point I had to separate from the women’s movement and the feminist artists group for which Lucy Lippard was a spokesperson. It seemed like all that these hundreds of women wanted to talk about was their careers and how they couldn’t get any shows. After I said I was a lesbian, no one responded, I felt invisible. They were apolitical, really. After a summer of consciousness-raising sessions in 1969 with Carol Gooden, Patsy Norvell, Trisha Brown, and me, I helped form another group with Patsy and artists Harmony Hammond and Sarah Draney, and the anthropologist Elizabeth Weatherford. We went to each other’s studios and talked about our work, the problems we were having being women artists, and how to move on, or not. It was very formal consciousness-raising. We accomplished a lot.

    INGRID: Is that when you began to question scale in your work?

    LOUISE: Franz Kline and Willem de Koonig were big for me – Joan Mitchell too. Then Minimalism came along and I was looking at Sol LeWitt and making hard-edge grid paintings. The group encouraged me to see that everything I was doing as a painter – in terms of scale, gesture, and even using stretched canvas and a paintbrush – was male, and this was problematic. I always hated women’s work – growing up first a tomboy, then an athlete, I never sewed. But I wanted to destroy what I had done. So I cut up my paintings and stitched them back together in a woven grid. That was my attempt at making a connection to women’s work and craft [laughs]; I even bought a book on stitching and knotting techniques. The scale was small. Some I stained in the bathroom sink. Then I started putting the cut-up canvas paintings in baggies and tacking them to the wall.

    INGRID: Were you looking at Eva Hesse’s work?

    LOUISE: I met Eva Hesse at the Cooper-Hewitt Decorative Arts Library in the Cooper Union building, where I worked. When Eva was attending the Cooper Union she had had my job, and she was close friends with the librarian, Edith Adams. When Eva told me she was going to cut her hair, I told her I’m going to cut mine, too. She didn’t say she had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. It wasn’t until the memorial show at the School of Visual Arts that I really saw her work. I started using liquid rubber in part as an homage to Eva, but also out of a sense of permission. Her work and my women’s group both made me feel like I could do anything I wanted. I may not get to show it, but I can make it. I can make what I want, even paintings on stretched canvas, if I wanted to.

    INGRID: Before we move ahead, let’s go back to when you were small, Louise. I can see from this childhood drawing you were already interested in the grid.

    LOUISE: That was done in the early forties when I was around six. The format comes from food coupons. The little figures are the brothers and sisters I would have liked to have had. Each kid has a name: “Fishman,” “Fisher,” or “Fisherman,” because I thought that anyone whose name had the word “fish” in it was a relative of mine. (My mother’s maiden name was Fisher.) When my shrink looked at this drawing she pointed to one child called “Jerry,” that had no arms and said, “I think that’s your brother.”

    INGRID: Philadelphia looms large in your life, making for one of many good reasons for doing this show with you are ICA. You were born, raised, and trained as an artist in Philadelphia. Since you moved to New York in 1965 there had been several exhibitions here keeping steady tabs on your new developments. In 1992 three simultaneous shows were held at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (organized by the incomparable curator and art historian Judith Stein) and the two galleries at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, where you received your BFA and BS in Education. More recently, in 2012 there was the exhibition at the Woodmere Art Museum, Generations: Louise Fishman, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, and Razel Kapustin, honoring a local legacy of women artists. Your aunt, Razel Kapustin, was a professional artist who studied with David Alfaro Siqueiros in New York and was very important role model for you. Your mother, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, was a dedicated painter who showed frequently in Philadelphia and Florida. She availed herself of the many opportunities Philadelphia offers its artists, from classes at the Barnes Foundation to membership in the Print, Sketch, and Pen and Pencil Clubs. Both Razel and Gertrude were, I might surmise, Angry Women.

    LOUISE: My mother was excited by anything artistic. She loved the Gilded Cage, Philadelphia’s first bohemian coffee-house, where artists and writers – maybe a few queers – drank Earl Grey Tea and espressos. Once, she took me along with her to a drawing class at The Print Club, and I was totally disinterested. I was a serious athlete, playing competitively on the Haverford High School girl’s basketball team. But the instructor said, “Louise, why don’t you do a drawing?” He put a board on an easel and gave me a pencil; they had a nude model, which I’d never been around before. I did a drawing and thought, that looks pretty good. Everybody in the class came over and went WOW. My mother, I thought my mother was going to have a heart attack. She was showing me what she was doing and suddenly I became the center of it. That was the first time that happened: I thought, oh, I can draw.

    INGRID: At ICA last year, a group exhibition of artist’s emotionally charged correspondence, organized by the queer and feminist art initiative Ridykeulous, included your small five-part Letter to My Mother about Painting (1972-73). It sounds like your mother opened up the field of art to you, yet this painting looks murderous.

    LOUISE: I know exactly where that anger came from. When I got that painting into the Whitney Biennial, I thought look how long it took me to get around to doing this. I had struggled for years to make sure my mother didn’t think I was going to be an artist. Even though making art is all I wanted to do and did, I did not want to succeed and I fought every way I could. In a rage, I went to the studio on Mercer Street and put up a piece of paper and wrote “Angry Louise!”

    It was so upsetting, I had to turn the paper to face the wall. Then I thought, I’m going to make one for Esther, with whom I was living. So, I made Angry Esther. Then I made one for my friend the writer Bertha Harris. I made ones for all of the women in my group, then all the people important to me, like Ti-Grace. Every one of them who came to my studio and saw her painting was really upset. It was as if I’d gotten inside and exposed this anger with which we all identified. They were portraits, somehow, the Angry Paintings, and they had so much power.

    INGRID: It’s significant, then, what a relatively small and contained body of work it is. Like a powder keg, the Angry Paintings liberated you to pick up a knife and start painting again. I’m thinking of that series from the mid-seventies, in which the paint is slathered on disks of Masonite with a blade, then incised. There’s even razor blades embedded in the bruise-blue impasto surface of one of them. These works are sculptural as objects, but your painting in general, it gestures, are full of slashing strokes and cutting physicality. Are you a latent sculptor, Louise?

    LOUISE: I would say so. I’ve had crises at various moments, like in the 1908s when I did that portrait of myself as a man. I was in my studio on Eighteenth Street and across the street was a chain factor. And it struck me, what is it I’m doing? This is not meaningful. Chains have a function. Painting doesn’t do anything. It sounds a little bizarre, but I wanted something from m work that was much more concrete.

    INGRID: I was interested to come across a trove of early ceramics. Stoneware slab work, not thrown but folded and paddled into vessel forms.

    LOUISE: I was very fortunate when I was at Tyler to study with Rudy Staffel. Learning to use a kick wheel is really hard, which is maybe why I loved doing it, because it was so athletic – all that kicking. Rudy would put his hand gently over yours to show you what kind of weight to use.

    INGRID: It’s nice you can still feel his hand. Though your ceramics, I must say, are the antithesis of Rudy Staffel’s porcelain “light-catchers.”

    LOUISE: In graduate school at the University of Illinois, there was a good ceramics teacher and I did mostly hand-built pieces. The desire to move into three-dimensional form has always been there. Early on, I did some woodcarving and a lot of modeling from life in plasticine. One time, when I was studying at the Fleisher Art Memorial, a teacher came over and while he was talking to me – he was nervous – he was touching the clay. “Get your hands off my sculpture,” I said. Apparently the faculty had a meeting about me, the woman in the white turtleneck sweater, and how difficult I was. I could be nasty. I remember walking into a jazz bar in Philadelphia to see Nina Simone and saying hello to some people I knew; they later told me how much I scared them. Really I was just so anxious. I wanted to be Giacometti and that wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t afford the materials or the space. I could afford to paint in my parent’s basement and that’s what I did.

    INGRID: When you started painting on canvas again in the late 1970s, how did you approach scale?

    LOUISE: Like you said, with a knife! I never used a brush or added any medium. It was very gradual working my way back to oil paint and linen, actually.

    INGRID: So the paint itself was slab-like?

    LOUISE: Yes, and the work was modest in scale. Then I went to the MacDowell Colony in July 1980 and returned with all of these really little paintings, based in scale on the predella panels of Duccio’s Maestà altarpieces, which I saw on my first trip to Italy, in 1979. That was the first time I worked on small paintings. It was also my first time using a curved mark since my student years; up to this point, I was using only horizontal and vertical elements. The miniature paintings that I did thirty years later come out of finding these stunningly small stretched canvases at an art supply store in Berlin, where I was having a show in 2008.

    INGRID: What is the relationship between the miniatures and your large paintings?

    LOUISE: No matter the size, I think of my works as experiments in scale. I’m always aware of what’s happening on the canvas relative to my hands, my arms, my fingers, the stretch of my whole body. There’s an athleticism in that, but I also have an interest in diminutive things that are smaller than they’re supposed to be.

    INGRID: Small things do convey a sense of compression – being squeezed down in size – that is certainly physical. But there is the relationship between the miniature and the conceptual, as is so perfectly contained by Marcel Duchamp’s “Museum in a Suitcase.” Likewise, your tiny paintings appear ready-made to exist in the mind’s eye, as objects of contemplation. Speaking of Duchamp, let’s talk about the explosion in a slat factory – as one wag called his Nude Descending a Staircase – that is this stack of painted strips on cardboard and other materials.

    LOUISE: First let me say how important it was growing up in Philadelphia and seeing Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors in the same museum as Rogier van der Weyden’s monumental crucifixion with the mourning virgin, Cézanne’s bathers, and the work of Mondrian, Rouault, Soutine. As students, we used to climb on Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. Even before the women’s movement, art gave me a sense of freedom and permission that anything was possible. I wasn’t imprisoned. And even though I’ve remained a painter – one who adores paint and the tradition of painting – I think there is the potential to do anything.

    The “slats” are from the monoprints I made with Susan Oehme at her print studio in Colorado. They are the plates: scraps of cardboard, mat board, wood, and sandpaper that she had around that I painted and we sent through the press. When the plates turned out to be as interesting as the prints, I kept them.

    INGRID: Some are very tiny, just shards and slivers. Together they read like an index of painting, mark making, drawing, pigments, and materials that is both astonishingly replete and generative.

    LOUISE: It was a terrifically productive moment. I had just begun a relationship with Ingrid Nyeboe. At the end of the two weeks, Susan said, “Louise, you must be in love.” She had never seen anyone make so much work.

    INGRID: Your work strongly conveys a sense of ethics, in the value of labor, in thrift, in being resourceful, scrappy. Nothing appears to go to waste.

    LOUISE: I have paintings on sandpaper that started with scraping down the surface of a canvas and then working back into the sandpaper. I’ve done the same thing with paper towels. I’m always paying attention to process and scouting for new materials. I used to get a lot of interesting stuff to paint on – squares of Bakelite and rubber, those Masonite circles – on Canal Street.

    INGRID: I’m impressed by the carpet samples. They are such unappealing objects to begin with, yet you’ve transformed them into such beautifully tactile little paintings that manage to draw extra power by appearing to be messed-up carpet samples only partially redeemed by art.

    LOUISE: I made those when I was in residence at Dartmouth College for two months and ran out of linen. But it’s true, I would paint on almost anything, including myself if that were viable.

    INGRID: Let’s talk about the leporellos: such an arcane name for a book with accordion-folded pages. Apparently it was a popular Victorian form of binding for tourist souvenir panoramas.

    LOUISE: I still have a leporello guide to Giotto’s frescoes in Padua that I bought the first time I went to Italy, in 1979, when I saw the Duccios and realized that I wanted to paint small.

    What inspired me to use the leporello form to paint in was learning about a Japanese tradition of carrying these books like passports to be marked at Buddhist pilgrimage sites. I made my first one in 1992, after I got back from New Mexico; it has to do with Agnes Martin and scale. I had gone to Galisteo, where she was at the time, because I had the horrible crisis of a fire in my studio. My partner Betsy Crowell and I rented Harmony Hammond’s house, and I was a mess.

    A couple of remarkable days were spent with Agnes in her studio not saying anything. She sat in her rocking chair and looked at me every once in a while. And I thought, what’s going on here? Oh, she’s meditating. I know how to do that. So I went into my breath and did my meditation. I watched Agnes and listened to her, later, when she showed me drawings and pulled out paintings and talked about her dealer and whatever else artists talk about. It was clear that the work was a meditation for Agnes, a path, and that I could quiet myself down.

    Having a fire in your studio is one of the most unhinging experiences an artist can have; everything falls apart. When we got back to upstate New York I started making these books that suddenly made perfect sense. There were little grids and bigger grids, rubbings and blottings. I got interested in transferring the image from one side of the page to the other, because these books can be used in different directions and don’t really have a front or back, beginning or end.

    INGRID: I’m thinking about your feminist journaling and how these books relate to your early interest in writing. They read in such an interesting way, because they’re so episodic. Serene passages of watercolor drawing are interrupted by seismic eruptions of oil paint, metal stapes, and built-up accretions of paper and various media. They’re contained, yet volatile; they don’t want to be closed—or opened! This one is a crucible of painting so gooey that the pages are protesting as we pull them apart.

    LOUISE: I never make drawings for paintings. So I’ve been surprised at hoe many ideas that seem to appear on canvas as if from nowhere can actually be found in these little books from years earlier.

    INGRID: So we’re sitting in your studio with these very sculptural books in front of us, surrounded by objects. Louise, you’re a collector.

    LOUISE: It started with Chinese scholar’s rocks. In 1985 I saw an exhibition at the China Institute, curated by John Hay – I still have the catalogue, Kennels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art – and my mind was blown. Because not only were these rock formations extraordinary, but their bases had been carved to correspond to their contours. It was the most beautiful melding of one object into another – in total respect of the rock.

    So I started learning about scholar’s rocks. It never occurred to me that I could own one. But Bernard Lennon, my dealer at the time, knew the sculptor Richard Rosenblum, who was based in Boston and had an incredible rock collection. He told me about a couple of guys who had stands at the flea markets and little antique centers that used to be all over New York. And I started buying, spending $25 or $90 for these beautiful rocks.

    INGRID: Aptly, I see a discipline, a form of study. It’s very specific what you collect. Besides the scholar’s rocks here in the studio, you are a collector of African sculptures, American milking stools, and Venetian glass.

    LOUISE: I don’t know how disciplined you would consider my collecting if you knew how much stuff I have at home! But they’re objects to draw, subjects to study and just have around for their impact. With the African art, which I first started looking at in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, what I became interested in were these small-scale pieces, mostly bronzes, some so small I couldn’t believe it. There was one African dealer, also at the flea market, who was educating me. Some of what I bought may not have been authentic. It didn’t’ matter. This one piece looks like it has a certain amount of weight, and when you hold it, it’s like a feather. That idea amazes me.

    INGRID: What special appeal do the other collections have?

    LOUISE: The three-legged stools are for milking, but the rest are all work stools. They have all taken on the shape and wear of individual use and work over time. I used to get them at auctions in upstate New York for $5 or $10, but now the antique pickers bid up the prices too high for me to be interested in continuing to collect them. I began collecting the glass after Ingrid and I started spending time in Venice. We may have gone to Murano, but I wasn’t that interested until I saw this beautiful piece at a flea market. It was 100 euros, which seemed like a hell of a lot of money, but I bought it. Then I started reading catalogues and found out the period I was interested in was the 1930s to the 1950s. I’ve gotten a lot of exquisite glass on eBay.

    INGRID: Again, there’s something about weight: this tiny Carlo Scarpa glass bowl is incredibly heavy.

    LOUISE: There are iron filings in the glass, which can contain all kinds of odd materials, like glitter. I’ve recently made paintings and watercolors inspired by Spuma de Mare, a technique that Ercole Barovier invented for getting something decorative to happen inside the glass that makes it look like foam churning up from the sea.

    INGRID: That’s another correspondence with your work, the elemental nature of these objects. I always feel close to the substance of your materials: the minerality of oil paint, for instance, the malachite of malachite green. On another studio visit you showed me the mortar and pestle you used in 1988 to pulverize the soil you collected at the Pond of Living Ashes at Birkenau for your Remembrance and Renewal paintings.

    LOUISE: I think all of that has everything to be with being a Jew. My family were Ashkenazim and they were Talmudic scholars. When I was studying Yiddish I went to a lot of old movies. I remember identifying so intensely with this silent film about the golem – the creature made from clay – brought to life to protect the Jews of Prague. Being an American didn’t make any difference. I still had that desire for something supernatural that could protect us, protect me.

    INGRID: Is that, in part, what painting does: protect you? I’m thinking less about the golem and more about your anger as a material, one that has never been fully transformed by alchemy or anything supernatural, but rather, has been annealed by your art. To anneal is to burn, to make a substance stronger by making it softer, less brittle. To be in your studio now: it’s the work that’s on fire, not you!

    LOUISE: Yes, I am happy being benign Louise. I’m allowing myself much more freedom in the studio. I would have never been allowed all that white space of the canvas to be there before. I wanted to give everything a lot of richness, but this is a different story. Now it’s about giving reign to what paint does on its own. And I do think there’s something magical about painting. Something is made out of paint, aside from the purpose it gives my life. You know, I stopped painting to have this knew replacement and I have no idea what’s going to happen when I get back to work. I mean, it’s a complete mystery.

     

  • “Conversation with Joan Jonas.” Joan Jonas: They Come to Us without a Word. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT List Visual Arts Center, New York, New York : Gregory R. Miller & Co., Ostfildern, Germany : Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2015, pp. 114-131.

    Conversation with Joan Jonas

    BELLS
    MASKS
    STONES
    STICKS
    DOGS
    TOYS
    HOOPS
    CONES
    COSTUMES
    MIRRORS
    WATER
    WIND

    I propose the list above, of elements Joan Jonas often uses in her work, as a place to begin.

    In 2001, Jonas was one of twelve artists to accept my invitation to make a new work in response to an old American Impressionist painting in the collection of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. When I tried to find out what she was doing, she rebuffed my attempts so cordially and firmly that I resigned myself to the possibility that she might not be doing anything at all. But of course, Jonas delivered. An assortment of objects and video equipment arrived at the museum. Next came Jonas and an assistant, who, absorbed in composition, spent all morning in the gallery, as if it were the studio.

    The finished installation was a small set up: a giant metal hoop, a child’s desk, an easel holding a chalkboard on which rough shapes had been dryly drawn, and a video monitor. In the video, a white dog jumped through a hoop that was held by the assistant. The timing had been jiggered to make the dog appear to fly, to float, to leap forward then soar backward before touching the ground: to stick in space. It was dreamy, looping endlessly, accompanied by the sound of a musical saw that seemed to drift from some otherworldly dimension or, perhaps, from the circus.

    Some stage magic had definitely taken place, because the project’s august premise – William Merritt Chase’s painting of scrubby dunes on a sunny day, three girls in white frocks industriously picking bayberries, and, looming small in the distance, the giant Victorian cottage whence the girls presumably came – seemed to have completely disappeared. And yet, an even stronger sense of the picture remained. In the scale of the desk, the old-fashioned props, the charming film, and in all the mysterious emptiness in between, the painting flickered like a memory briefly entertained, then abandoned, in favor of this wonderfully perplexing new image.

    Since the 1960s, Jonas’s essentially improvisational art has been a discipline of assembling not only the provisions – the ideas, the images, the props, the performers – she needs but also the requisite pressure. Jonas pushes herself and her collaborators, curators and institutions alike, to keep a situation open for as long as possible in order to make the urgency and exhilaration of realizing the work fully a part of her art’s potential and experience. Building suspense is a critical part of the process. Although the United States Pavilion in Venice will be one of her most important commissions, with an anticipated 440,000 viewers, Jonas is no less committed to her art’s brinksmanship. Hence, the list on the opposite page of things one might expect to find in the work of Joan Jonas primes a discussion of the still-fluid ideas and images she is now preparing to use in Venice to stage her art.

    JOAN JONAS: I looked at your list and I made word associations because there are relationships. BELLS, STONES, STICKS, TOYS, CONES, WATER, and WIND all make different kinds of sounds. But that’s not why I chose each one. Bells ring. Stones, I used them to click together and to define space by the way they echoed. And I collect stones. I collect bells. Sticks, the same.

    INGRID SCHAFFNER: Lists have a rhythm.

    JJ: Yes, I like lists. There is also the visual aspect. Each toy suggests a little world of its own that adds something to my content. There is also something grotesque about toys for adults – I mean children’s toys – and I like that double aspect.

    The HOOP I chose for different reasons. One was that when I first began to do performances with drawings, I drew circles and lines because they’re the basic elements of depiction. And then I was inspired by Houdini to have a hoop made. It was six feet in diameter and, for a performance in 1970, I had myself rolled around the block. That particular hoop has been a major element in my work over the years.

    Later I collected wooden hoops, sports hoops, in Italy, actually. The cone is another object I use because of its relation to form.

    IS: Right, the magician waves a hoop around the levitated woman to prove his trick is real. What about metaphors and models of perception? There is the cone of vision, of hearing. The cone of silence?

    JJ: I’ve used the cone for all of those things. In Mirage, there are tin cones that I look through, listen through, then use to direct sound around the room. It’s a beautiful form, and it’s also functional.

    WATER is everywhere and it’s a medium. WIND is a character – mysterious and frightening – and a very strong element in my work. My very first film is called Wind [1968].

    IS: In the film, a line of performers is trying to put on and take off their coats while being battered by the wind; it’s like a silent comedy.

    JJ: Well, I like comedy.

    IS: It’s good to get that straight.

    JJ: MIRRORS creates a space. They also change the space. And they can break. It always makes people a little bit uncomfortable to see a mirror, to perceive themselves. The first prop I used was a mirror.

    IS: In Mirror Check [1970], one of your most iconic works, you are inspecting your naked body with a small hand mirror in front of an audience who cannot see your mirror image, but only know how you respond to it. So what about dogs and masks?

    JJ: DOGS and MASKS are two of the most important. When I started working on Organic Honey [1972], my first video piece, I worked with what was around me – what was nearby. My dog Sappho was there. I excuse my use of the dog by saying it’s an animal helper, like in a myth or fairytale. They call it a “familiar.”

    IS: Usually the helper is a black cat, but you always had a white dog.

    JJ: Not always. My dog is beige now. There were two dogs in a row that were white: Sappho, then Zina. In the mid-eighties, Sappho chewed up a lot of my costumes and props. It was quite liberating, actually, to be freed to think about new images.

    IS: That was helpful of Sappho. Your current familiar is named?

    JJ: Ozu, after the Japanese film director [Yasujirō Ozu, 1903-1963]; I love his use of everyday objects and moments. When I traveled to Japan for the first time in 1970 with Richard Serra, we went to the Noh theater. I was deeply affected and started working with masks immediately after that. Masks were, for me, perfect, because they hid my face. I was not a performer when I began in 1968; I didn’t want to be Joan Jonas. The mask gave me another identity. COSTUMES also transform.

    IS: You are widely regarded for bringing together performance, video, and installation in ways that we now take for granted in contemporary art. Let’s expand the list with the various modes and mediums of your work, starting with MOVEMENT and DANCE.

    JJ: I trained as a sculptor. My work, which I mostly destroyed a long time ago, was influenced by Giacometti. It was the early sixties; I was living uptown, married to a writer, Gerry Jonas, when I started going downtown, where I experienced the work of La Monte Young, Claes Oldenburg, Simone Forti, among others, for the first time.

    IS: Just by crossing Fifty-Seventh Street, then, you went from museums and modernism into an emerging art world of Minimalism, performance, happenings, music, and dance.

    JJ: I saw Lucinda Childs perform a piece that was, for me, very strange. And immediately I thought, “Oh my god, this is very attractive. I have to do this.” That’s when I really decided to go into performance, but it took me several years.

    In order to perform you have to move. I took all of the workshops I could, and each was different. Deborah Hay’s would be about doing a movement that she might do; Yvonne Rainer, the same thing. Trisha Brown used theatrical exercises developed by Viola Spolin to teach improvisation. Steven Paxton was working with everyday movement. Lucinda Childs was very controlled. I would also go to their performances. You learn by looking, and I wanted to see what was already being done.

    IS: Your project to become a performance artist began with a period of intense research. Was it inhibiting not being a trained dancer?

    JJ: No, it wasn’t, actually. I even went to Merce Cunningham’s classes once or twice, where I saw for myself in the mirror how totally different a dancer’s body is. But to become a performer, I really had to learn how to move, which I did, in part by doing my own thing.

    IS: Your first performances with mirrors were, uncomfortably, silent, but SOUND soon became a shaping element.

    JJ: My first thought when I stepped from sculpture into performance was that now I can make something with sound. Initially, I made sound in abstract ways – clapping blocks of wood, for instance, like in Noh theater – to sound out space, or silence. I was also interested in sound delay and in creating situations where you saw a sound being made before you heard it.

    IS: The art historian Douglas Crimp used the term “de-synchronization” to describe your strategy of taking us out of the flow of real time. How did VIDEO, which you’ve greatly used to abet this aim, enter the picture?

    JJ: I love film and have always gone to the movies. The minute I found out about the Portapak camera, I wanted to get one. So, I did. In 1970, when we went to Japan, I bought one there and started working with video. I imagined that I was making film. I had experimented with Super 8, but actual film is very complicated. Video is instantaneous, and it was a new form. I was very interested in that. I began by exploring the qualities of the medium that were different from film. However, throughout my work, the way I use time and think about time remains very influenced by what I know about film – and music.

    IS: Film is called the mirror of its age. You’ve used video like a mirror in your PERFORMANCES and INSTALLATIONS.

    JJ: To make work, I must have something concrete in my mind. When I started doing performance, I needed a place to enter, and that’s when I thought of the stage. The stage could be an empty city lot, Jones Beach, a school gymnasium, or my loft, which is where the pieces began to be more theatrical, in terms of sets and costumes. But I didn’t start concentrating on installation as an independent form until 1994, with my retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Nor did I really show my work in galleries until the 1990s. But I did show my videos and performances at Castelli-Sonnabend in the seventies.

    IS: DRAWING in your work is more than a medium, it’s a way of thinking and performing.

    JJ: In the early outdoor works, I purposefully set the audience at a distance, because I saw the gestures and configurations as drawings in space. After I got the Portapak, I started drawing for the camera. I would make small drawings on stage that audiences experienced on screen, as large projections. I had all these different ways of drawing that were influenced by the setup of the camera and the monitor. Don’t look at the paper. You can’t totally control drawing in a performance. It gives you a different way to arrive at an image. The result is always surprising.

    IS: Wearing a billowing paper coat and hat, you appear to have become a drawing element in recent work.

    JJ: I’m a character making drawing. With each new piece, I think, what image do I want to draw? How shall I draw? And how can I make the drawing relate to the situation, because that’s always a question.

    IS: Which brings us to the question: what will you draw for VENICE?

    JJ: The subject is animals. There will be a lot of drawings in three of the four main rooms. They are based on installations I did at the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Kitakyushu, Japan, where I’ve been an artist in residence four times.

    On my third visit, I brought along an old book I found in San Diego of Japanese FISH. Often what happens in my work is that I get inspired by something beautiful, hand-drawn illustrations, exquisitely colored. In Japan, you eat a lot of fish, and we’re all thinking about overfishing. This is really what attracted me to the idea of using the book to make drawings of fish and hang them in a certain way, not on the walls but throughout the space, from poles.

    I wanted to work with a craft particular to Japan, and a kite maker agreed to make me about eighty KITES out of Japanese paper and bamboo. Traditionally, the kites, which come in all of these beautiful shapes, are decorated, but mine were like blank sheets of paper. In Kitakyushu, I painted them different colors, then pasted shapes cut from hand-tinted paper, using stencils based on the drawings I was doing.

    IS: The kites will bring wind, and the fish water, to Venice. What about Matisse? The kites make me think of his cutouts.

    JJ: Matisse is one of my favorite artists

    IS: To get that sweep and scale of line, Matisse famously drew with a piece of charcoal attached to a long pole – a fishing pole, perhaps. Joan, you draw with a crooked stick! You’ve also been known to use ink and chunks of ice, as well as to dribble ink into snow. Like a witch, a crone, a shaman, with a wand, a cane, a dowser’s rod, you make drawings appear as if by divination or magic.

    JJ: I like to work very fast. I draw the fish by looking at the book and not at the paper, which is on the floor. I’m standing, using a long brush. One minute, two at most. I’m always looking to bring in new techniques.

    I’m also doing BEE drawings, using a Rorschach-style inkblot technique. Given how much drawing there will be, I’m already talking to a conservator about archivally printing these works on paper and showing copies, so they don’t fade away in the Venetian light. I’m also working with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia on a curtain that will be both theatrical and functional in the space.

    IS: Schools of fishes, swarms of bees. What brings the bees to Venice?

    JJ: I’m trying to unite different elements on various levels. The bees partly come from reading Jakob von Uexküll [1864-1944], a German biologist, who wrote about animal perception. I’ve always loved his description of how bees fine nectar, transport pollen, and make honey, it’s so miraculous. He was also the first to study the “information dance” that bees use to communicate; they do four different dances.

    IS: Apparently, it’s relational: the mood of the hive affects how well the dance and its encoded message are received. I imagine signals in the hive are increasingly down, given the global effects of climate change, pesticides, and destruction of habitat on bee populations.

    JJ: Certainly, it’s an issue that connects the imagery of fish and bees. But I didn’t want to make a gloomy piece about the world situation, even though it is a sad situation. That’s why I have the CHILDREN. I wanted to have their innocent voices. This is their future we are talking about, after all.

    IS: Where are you finding the children, and how will their voices be incorporated into Venice?

    JJ: Through workshops. We’ll meet every Saturday until March, when I leave for Venice. They’re mostly children of artist friends, ranging from the five-year-old girl next door to Lorna Simpson’s and Carol Shymanski’s teenage daughters. We will talk about animals, about things that are threatened, creatures that might be disappearing, or not Children think, “Oh bees, they sting.” But I found a very nice beekeeper in Manhattan, who is also a biology teacher, to show us bees and all that they do. Another thing I want to do with the children is try and make little bee dances.

    IS: What a sweet echo of all those lovely early downtown dance workshops!

    JJ: We’ll see what happens, starting next week. The workshops are being held in a big space MIT has rented for me to use as a STUDIO in the West Village. We set up a back-projection screen with two stages; each stage has a screen with front and back projection. We’ll have a computer and a video mixer, like I use in all of my performances, so you can go from live camera to prerecorded video. During the workshops, we’re going to be projecting from both directions, sometimes mixing, sometimes blocking, with the children in front and around the screens. It will be a big visual experiment. In Venice, the stages and screens will be part of the installation; you can see them in the model.

    IS: [looking at the model] That’s amusing, the scale model of a viewer looks like a Giacometti. I also see you have blocked off the central doorway so that visitors enter through the left wing of the pavilion.

    JJ: I got the idea from Sarah Sze’s approach to the pavilion during the last Biennale [2013]. It makes for a more linear progression through the four rooms and the rotunda. In a way, the whole piece is like a performance that you go through one room at a time.

    IS: I’m thinking of Reanimation (In a Meadow), your work for dOCUMENTA (13), which also took the form of a very inviting little house in a public garden, but there, viewers could only look through the windows. I especially remember the video of glaciers appearing like sad and monstrous figments of global warming in a room.

    JJ: I’m always looping elements of the last project into the next. Reanimation started with Halldór Laxness’s 1968 novel Under the Glacier and continued my interest in Iceland. It also introduced the imagery of bees and marked a shift toward more environmental thinking. And yes, in Venice you get to go inside the house.

    IS: The fourth, and last, room we haven’t talked about yet. The setup in the model looks like one of your stage sets, with relatively domestic seating elements and screens.

    JJ: And like the last part of one of my performances, the fourth room may not get resolved until the very end. I recently saw a drawing of the eye of a whale and it looked just like a human eye. All mammals have “semicircular canals” in their ears. There is the eye of the storm. And then, we come from fish. I’m trying to unite these things in the last room, the “human room.” I’m not worried right now if it’s going to make sense in that way. This is how I work.

    I shot video in Canada last summer, in relation to Venice (some of it Ozu did with a GoPro camera around his neck). I’m also working with ghost stories from Cape Breton.

    IS: Cape Breton, like Iceland, is another embedded landscape in your work.

    JJ: I’ve been going there since 1970. Rudy Wurlitzer and Philip Glass, with JoAnne Akalaitis, bought an old summer camp with all these A-frames, and they invited Richard Serra and me along with a number of other artists. We eventually bought land. I now have my own house and studio and spend part of every summer there. I’m inspired by the place.

    There used to be a magazine called Cape Breton’s Magazine, full of stories and interviews, chronicling aspects of the culture that were dying out. The ghost stories are from the magazine’s collection. I didn’t want a literary ghost story; these are just very everyday people talking about their experiences.

    IS [reading]: “The wind … opened the front door. It was a beautiful afternoon…. Just like a choir, the voices came in.”[footnote=1]

    JJ: I will use fragments like that.

    IS: Research is an important part of the process. Are there other sources for Venice?

    JJ: The work always begins with finding a subject of interest and then exploring where that interest leads. For Venice, I’ve been reading John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? [1980], which talks about ancient bonds between humans and animals that are broken, and Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal [2004]. It was Agamben’s philosophical writing on the tick that led me to Uexküll. I’m looking at these great illustrations he used to show how different creatures – a fly, a dog, a human – see the same room.

    IS: The human room: the dog only sees snacks and things to jump up on. Coincidentally, I just saw a work by Pierre Huyghe titled Umwelt after Uexküll’s concept of worlds of animal perception. Will there be a PERFORMANCE in Venice?

    JJ: Yes. Right after the opening I will come back to New York to start working on a performance that will take place somewhere in Venice. I never perform in my installations. It really takes all of my concentration to develop and installation, and the performance is more or less another endeavor working with the same material. I will reedit the video and work with the composer Jason Moran on the sound.

    IS: This will be the third time you’ve collaborated with Jason. How do you two work together?

    JJ: To start, I talk about the themes, show him some video backdrops, and he responds by playing a sequence or a tune. I choose what I like best. We respond to each other rhythmically. It’s his music and we add sounds. It’s important to say that we don’t collaborate on the performance, but working with Jason has had a great effect on my work. Also, once the piece is set, the improvisation is over. I always perform it exactly the same way.

    IS: Like a ritual. Who are some of the other COLLABORATORS and CONTRIBUTORS to Venice?

    JJ: I like working with artists; they bring their own way of doing things. David Dempewolf is my veejay. Although I oversee all aspects of the editing process, he is technically my support. He knows my work really well and helps me to bring in material from past works. He’s also a really good audience. We’ve worked together for eight years.

    I’m also working with several others: David Sherman on video, and Meredith Walker and Jin Jung on other aspects, such as props, models, and SketchUp files.

    Jan Kroeze is a professional lighting designer and friend since the seventies. When he heard I was doing Venice, he said, “I want to do the lighting.” Which is great, because lighting is not my thing.

    IS: It’s a very intergenerational team, Joan, from age five and up. Does your experience as a teacher play a role in your work?

    JJ: I’m not sure what direct effect, if any, teaching has had on my work. But I’ve been inspired by individual students, and by the activity of teaching. It certainly kept me from the isolation of the studio. It started with some part-time teaching at UCLA in the early nineties; then, I was hired at the Academy in Stuttgart [Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künst Stuttgart], where I worked closely with students. I was going through a transition; it was a good period. At MIT, where I taught from 1998 and am now professor emerita, the exchanges with students and colleagues and access to new technology have been great.

    IS: As invitingly rich and layered as your installations and performances are, there is also something forbidding about your work. We want to enter the image, but we’re held back by a sense of trespass or danger. There are jarring visual leaps, abrupt and dissonant sounds, manic movements, gaps. There’s screaming.

    JJ: From the very beginning, I wanted a slight disturbance – I wouldn’t use the word “shock,” just an uneasiness. I’ve often been asked about fragmentation in my work. What I recognize is a conscious desire to change the mood, to create a kind of strong rhythm, through a soundscape or a landscape that is always shifting. Because I was looking at the structure of film, I was interested in the potential of the cut, in cutting, which is never seamless in my work. I think it also reflects my way of thinking and speaking: I want to make beautiful images, but I’m not really interested in pleasing people.

    IS: You have such a unique voice. In tone and timbre, your speaking voice is nothing short of a material presence. As an artist, you are a strong feminist voice. Your work critically addresses the ways in which women are perceived and represented in culture; at the same time, it embodies and constructs a profoundly female world. So my question is: were you born with that voice?

    JJ: The way I speak, I was born that way. I have a very low voice – it’s gotten gruffer and less soft; I do speak fast and in monotone. What I’ve worked on is opening up my throat and my body, and having a certain clarity of rhythm. It was useful to perform with the Wooster Group and work with my voice in relation to text. I’ve acted in two of their productions; in Nayatt School [1978], I played a character named Celia Coplestone.

    Finding my own voice as an artist was very important. I was involved with the feminist movement, as were all of my artist friends. Improvising with my own sensibility and body was partially research into the question of whether or not there is such a thing as female imagery. Seeing Jack Smith, who performed, like in Noh theater, both the male and female parts and with such femininity, had a profound effect. When I began working more directly with narrative – with fairytales, myth, the writings of H.D. [Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961] – I was exploring the place of women in history, as outsiders, witches, storytellers. I have always been interested in the poetics of how women are depicted, which is political, of course.

    IS: From voice to Vorstellung: Joan, we are mutual fans of the German art historian Aby Warburg and his passion for the driving force of images, which he linked across time and space in his Atlas of Memory [1972-29]. Vorsellung was his term for the mental picture behind an image. He ascribed to it an almost supernatural power to transmit and animate cultural memory. I experience a similar intensity, ambition, emotion, through your work.

    JJ: My work is, in a fundamental way, about making and connecting images. I’ve always been interested in how ritual and myth can be used to describe a present-day situation or suggest a character. I didn’t know that term, but I was deeply moved by Warburg when I explored his character and writings for Line in the Sand [2002]; I had the feeling he could have been a dancer, he was so attuned to movement. Warburg’s openness to world cultures was also exciting to discover.

    IS: Let’s bring the conversation back to Venice by way of a picture behind the image of your work in my mind: Velázquez’s Las Meninas [1656]. There is the easel, the dog, the mythic cast of characters, and the mirror, a magic mirror that brings viewers onto the very stage of picture making. Are there pictures you are looking forward to seeing in Venice – a city of water, glass, reflections – and will mirrors be a part of your new work?

    JJ: I love Tintoretto. I studied Renaissance art history in college; the intellectual aspects of Mannerism attracted me.

    I am working with glassmakers in Murano on several things right now. The rotunda space joins the two wings of the pavilion, and I was thinking of making a kind of chandelier, naturally. I am designing a metal shape on which to hang crystals. A light will shine through them, like ice. It’s an experiment at this point. But I made a similar piece for Reanimation.

    I’m also experimenting with having mirrors made in Murano. Because I want distortion, they are working with an old-fashioned technique that Alex Rosenberg, a former student, reminded us of. You make a big glass cylinder – it looks like a bottle – and cut it. The glass actually flops open. These mirrors are thick and they’re beautiful. We’re making several. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them yet.

    Ingrid Schaffner interviewed Joan Jonas at her New York studio on January 6, 2015. Thanks to Erik Moskowitz, Amanda Trager, Rachel Pastan, and Chris Taylor for their excellent input in the process of preparing this interview

     

  • “Slim Volume,” Moyra Davey: Burn the Diaries [a supplement]. Philadelphia: Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; Vienna, Austria: the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 2014, pp. 7-20.

    Slim Volume

    The most remarkable element of this exhibition is a slim volume that could escape notice – not that books are in any way extraordinary in the work of Moyra Davey, an artist and essayist whose photographs, videos, and writings are full of images of them. This, however, is the first time she has ever made a book as an integral part of a new installation. Think of it as a commission, like that of a sculpture. That’s what I told Robert, my Institute of Contemporary Art colleague, and so we portioned the budget accordingly, dedicating the lion’s share – an amount the museum typically spends to pack and ship existing works of art – to the fabrication of Davey’s new publication.

    When you come across this enticing little 104-page paperback in the museum, it may very well look like someone mislaid it in the gallery. Like a pocket edition, Burn the Diaries is designed to be affordable and accessible. It contains two essays and many color photographs, one of the first of which shows a gamine young woman with bangs, reading a book in a subway car. Many of the photographs show details of books (pages, print, spines) and bookscapes (shelved, piled, scattered).

    Davey started out as a photographer in the early 1980s, but reading has become her medium. She has developed a singular body of work in which photography, film, and writing intertwine with her life in what is both a process and practice of reading. Deeply personal and acutely intellectual, the texts she reads range from the writings of Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf to the photographs of Peter Hujar; from the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder to the taped interviews Davey conducts with family and friends; from bottles of prescription medicine to a clump of psychoanalyst’s bills; from shelves loaded with records and stereo equipment to a dust bunny trapped beneath a dog’s paw. All satisfy Davey’s constant and voracious need for reading.

    In a way that is truly discursive, Davey has engaged fellow readers who respond with pleasure, insight, and often surprising candor. The body of writing created in relation to her art stands as one of that art’s achievements. Art historian George Baker, writer Chris Kraus, and curator Helen Molesworth are among the cultural luminaries who have written, by way of Davey’s work, brilliant essays on photography, collecting, archives, illness, abjection, feminism, queer culture, psychoanalysis, motherhood, memory, and, of course, dust. That these are some of the most potent themes of postmodernism – a movement that began in literature, reading everything in culture critically as text – only makes the reading, and the pressure Davey’s art exerts on the writing that mirrors it, more intense.

    In compiling her selected texts, Davey deploys photography and writing to frame, cut, quote, document, and reference – and to print. Print. She uses text – whether delivered as photograph, film, or actual book – to narrate, illuminate, analyze, interrogate, interpret, and even compose her life as an artist. So where does the reading stop and her life begin? This question gets raised early in Burn the Diaries when Davey quotes Pradeep Dalal, an artist friend who once observed critically of Davey’s work: “A part of me… wants to see… writing or reading, as personal and private and pleasurable…. Not everything we do it for art-making.” Dalal goes on to paraphrase Jean Genet’s advice to artists: “that to deepen your practice, it’s not just by studying writing, that it’s actually the other bits – the music, the theater, the film, and other things that all interlock and move you up a notch or two.” Davey’s response is to pick up the work of the French writer, criminal, and political activist and start reading.

    In Burn the Diaries, Davey details dreams had, music listened to, friends interrogated, films watched, memories unleashed, and other episodes of daily life during her reading of Genet. Her writing is structured, as it often is, through short entries, interspersed with quotations and separated by indexical headings, such as SNOW, SLEEP, DISCIPLINE, LIBIDO, GIACOMETTI, MONEY, ALISON.

    The second essay in the book is by Alison Strayer, a translator and writer living in Paris, who corresponds with Davey about her reading. Resistant from the start – “I scribble like a crank, ‘Why Genet?’” – Strayer responds by reaching reflexively for the work of Violette Leduc, another “blazing” outlaw figure of French literature (her writing was censored for its lesbianism). Leduc’s work cries out to be read: “Reader, my reader… stay with me’ is her clarion call [and] I am defeated in advance by her vigor,” Strayer writes of Leduc.

    Strayer oscillated between Davey’s project and a parallel investigation of her own life and reading. It turns out the two women have known each other since childhood, both having grown up in Ottawa. Meanwhile, the copy of Genet’s complete works that Davey is reading – an old Gallimard edition in French – bears an inscription from Strayer to artist Susan Kealey, a mutual friend who was dying when she gave the book to Davey. By the end of her essay, Strayer has accepted Davey’s Genet-reading project, not least because his language shed a blaze of light onto Susan’s diaristic writings (“her style was precise and vibrant”) and on writings as a vital way of life. “At the end of the day,” Strayer writes to Davey, “the diarist, dreamer, writer… seized the words that gallop ahead, or, as you, [Moyra] write, moves a soft lead pencil across a page.”

    Structurally speaking, Burn the Diaries is in many ways simply a plusher version of Davey’s very first book, a small, spiral-bound volume with a short text followed by pages of photographs. Grainy vintage portraits are paired with cold studies of toes (Davey made the feet of her husband, the artist Jason Simon, appear beastly). The text begins with an intimate fantasy about “the serene and the scatological,” then zeroes in on Surrealist philosopher Georges Batailles’s famous writings on the big toe and the nature of eroticism. A dead ringer for a Surrealist document, Davey’s [ages look like they could have come straight out of a book she was reading at the time: L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (1985) by Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, revelatory for artists and academics alike, opened up a new way of seeing what radical use the Surrealists made of photography as a form of research – that is, of exploring, indexing, and documenting the uncanny, unseen, and theoretical.

    The written component of her thesis exhibition, Object Choices at the University of San Diego in 1986, Davey’s first book was handed in but never shown. It remains in the artist’s possession, lasting proof that exhibitions are even more ephemeral than the documents they produce. Another lesson to abstract from Davey’s written thesis is one she learned as a teacher herself: “In one of the grad programs where I teach, students are required to write a thesis about their work and process. I notice that their photographs become vastly more interesting to me after I read what they’ve written about them: I like seeing their images shrunken and recontextualized, embedded in paragraphs of descriptive text.” Burn the Diaries, the book, makes discerning editorial use of photography, especially because the relationship between words and pictures here is far more associative than descriptive.

    What should not get lost in all of this reading is a sense of the heft and loft of the work itself. Text-based though her practice may be, Davey is an artist who makes objects and exhibitions. Burn the Diaries is not only the title of a book but also the name of the installation in which the book appears on a table, surrounded by a series of photographs printed on the scale of small posters and pinned directly to the walls of the gallery in which Davey’s new film, My Saints, is also shown. When asked how she would like to present the film – a question that has many ramifications, for a digitized medium can be shown on a monitor (what size? on a pedestal? wall mounted?) or as a projection (what’s the throw? how many lumens?) – Davey, ever pragmatic, specified only that there be a comfortable place for viewers to sit.

    These objects and their arrangement distill an entire household full of tables, chairs, books, screens, and couches. Like most pared-down gestures, Davey’s Spartan art has been years in the building. And since she is an artist who works at home, her rendition of gallery space into domestic space is a double occupation that operates on a surprising number of levels. On one, it is a feminist breach of authority to set up a modest life-work situation within the museum’s high cultural precinct. On another, Davey’s installation, though not exactly cozy, encourages us, as viewers, to make ourselves comfortable in the white cube; at the same time, it enforces a certain discipline. Reading requires concentration; to be lost in a book is to forget where you are and to forget even the object in hand (whether hardbound, paperback, or tablet). Similarly, Davey’s photos, film, and book all stand to disappear once viewers become readers within the volume of the gallery. So, quick, snap a picture. Davey’s show seems made, with provisionality in mind, to disappear – leaving in its wake a collection of documents: a book, a film, a stack of photos.

    The exhibition, Burn the Diaries, like the book, is editorial in construction, though perhaps less obviously. All similarly small in format, the photographs are arranged in a sequence of groupings that float – in a grid, a stack, or a line – with plenty of white space in between. The walls of the gallery stand like the pages of a giant picture essay, from which columns of text have been removed.

    The pictures are those Davey made for Burn the Diaries – including some that never actually made it into the book – plus images from past projects that expand on the book’s thematic lines and perennial preoccupations. Here are the dilapidated walls and dusty corners of Davey’s apartment building; here are cemeteries; here are dogs. The latter – portraits, really – Davey considers something of an indulgence (“I think my dogs have a human face,” she says of Rose and Bella’s sensitive gargoyle mugs). And yet, Davey notes, one often stumbles upon graves in the work of Genet, whose shuddering description of a scrawny dog taking a shit she quotes. Indeed, all the pictures hook back to the larger project of reading Genet, which in turn expands on the chapters of Davey’s own past work.

    The photos themselves are examples of her signature “mailers”: C-prints, folded and sent through the post. Each bears the marks of its journey – creases, stamps, spots of brightly colored tape, the name and address of recipient and sender written in ink – across the face of the image. Clearly identified as pieces of correspondence on view in the gallery to be read, mailers as a form entered Davey’s oeuvre almost by chance. She credits her Toronto dealer John Goodwin, long a creative catalyst when it comes to exhibiting her work. In 2007, Goodwin was so smitten with the look of some picture proofs he had asked Davey to fold up and mail to the gallery that he reproduced a facsimile of one as the announcement for her show. As works of art, the mailers were codified two years later when Davey, living in Paris on a residency, was invited by the New York gallery Murray Guy to participate in a group show. Daunted by the logistics and expense of shipping and framing, Davey had a liberating notion: Why not just mail the photographs and exhibit them as the pieces of paper they are?

    Davey hasn’t cut frames out of the picture entirely. One need only look at her early installations to see the strong and indelible presence of frames and framing. Regimented rows of gunmetal-blue steel frames turned her 1994 first gallery show at American Fine Arts in New York into a succinct study in museum display. At her final show at the gallery, a group of unframed photographs under glass was clustered on one wall like the elements of a collage that had drifted outside its frame and burst into a cloud of pictures. That was in 2003, the year dealer Colin de Land died and his gallery closed, in the wake of which Davey became a partner in Orchard, the pioneering space on the Lower East Side.

    Cooperatively run, Orchard brought the many activities of its members – art, music, film, performance, and writing – together in a discursive program of exhibitions and events. In 2006, Davey organized Reality/Play, a group show into which she inserted a screening of a new work of her own that marked her return to film. This curatorial experience, along with her experience of the basic dynamism of Orchard’s program – how others thought about space and used it – heightened Davey’s awareness of her work’s almost obverse relationship to space. Her training as a photographer had inculcated her to see everything within the context of the frame; everything outside it, she says, she simply edits out. Likewise, Davey’s approach to installation seems like that of a picture editor – whom we imagine works on a horizontal surface, say, a bog tabletop – sifting, sorting, cutting, pairing, and grouping images not according to their physical format but in terms of their relationship as images to one another.

    Film is all about editing. At ICA, Davey’s My Saints is shown as she prefers: projected in a dark space with a comfy couch – all the better to envelop us for the thirty-minute duration. In My Saints, artists, friends, and family members (many seated on couches) analyze a passage from Genet’s A Thief’s Journal. With each reading, the text – a scene in which Genet, the thief, watches with increasing detachment the mounting hysteria of a soldier searching for his stolen money – appears newly embodied. Each reader has her or his own individual take, and difference itself is manifested on-screen by the reader’s diverse ages, ethnicities, genders, and cultural backgrounds. Throughout the film, reading, subjectivity, and identity are powerfully linked and nuanced.

    In a sketchy reenactment of Genet’s text, scenes show cash being hidden and moved around Davey’s apartment, where her films are mostly shot. The first perp is her son, Barney. Now a teenager, he has been part of his mother’s work since he was born. (Davey’s first published book was the anthology Mother Reader, which she started to edit shortly after giving birth.) In My Saints, Barney stashes the cash in a book, which his mother later rifles through, only to find the money gone. In another scene, a violent game of tug-of-war between Barney’s father and the family dog is witnessed through a shadow play of silhouettes, cast across a bookcase in a sunny rom. The churning light and wild joy are as disruptive as a dream, as love.

    The film is an essay, structured in short episodes separated by titles, like the book with which the film shares narrative passages (Davey reading them in voice-over) and quotes (colorful typography on-screen). All three components – books, film, and photographs – contain overlapping material, though each has its own special scope and thrust. Unique to the film, for instance, are the interviews, which lightly play off a cinematic reference to Roam 666, Wim Wender’s 1982 documentary comprising a series of interviews with various people who respond to the same question about the future of film.

    We could keep going deeper into the processes of looking, cross-referencing analyzing, and interpreting that every frame, picture, and page invites. Certainly Davey’s arrangement – the couch, the table, the chair – has made us comfortable enough as viewers to settle down into the work of reading that she as an artist does every day. But we are almost out of time. We will have to limit our reading to just two passages, both from the film.

    “That was the hook,” Davey says near the beginning of My Saints, shortly after Dalal refers to Genet. Cut to a rickety ceiling fan, blades rotating, a little chain hanging down; enter, from below, Davey’s pale feet, followed by her long thin legs, reaching toward the ceiling then sticking up, midair. It’s just a little yoga, but so much else is there too, not least the artist’s own body. Davey has disclosed that she has been diagnosed with a degenerative disease, making both her frailty and her strength relative signs of the illness she lives with. Then there is the word “hooked,” offering a flash of legs hauled up and a body hanging like meat. To be hooked, of course, speaks of addiction (hooked on sex, drugs, booze, jazz, or Genet), the specific substance largely determining whether we’re talking attachment or abuse. Once you’re attuned, “hooked” is everywhere in Davey’s work, the word itself hooking together references, images, details, and texts into a powerful network, or safety net, holding art and life together by the delicate threads of strenuous reading.

    The second passage comes nearly at the end of the film. Davey and Strayer are on the phone, winding up their Genet reading project. “I kind of thought it was a money and shit thing,” Strayer says. “Can you comment?” The camera pans over black-and-white photographs Davey took in 1984 during a trip the pair made to Budapest, then stops on a portrait of Strayer gazing straight at the lens. Yes, Davey responds, at first she thought her reading of Genet was fairly typical, until she began hearing how much it differed from others’: only then did it “allow me to tap into memories… of my own sadism and my own tightfistedness.” Davey lets go a disarming chuckle, then declares, “You’re the first, Alison, to turn the table on me.”

    But the jig was up long ago. From the start, Davey’s work has depicted a complex imagery of that classic combination of money and shit, imagery that psychoanalysts read (and Bataille wrote about) in terms of excess and expenditure, abandon and control. Copperheads (1990), her uncannily enlarged portraits of old pennies, for instance, could not show lucre to be filthier. Her first film, Hell Notes (1990), starred Simon and Davey in the story of a wife whose money madness turns a couple’s life to shit – a Super 8 mm rendition of Erich von Stroheim’s silent classic Greed. Elsewhere she relates what a shrink once told her about paper and ink (smearing, pulpy, both inherently anal), offers tidbits from a cocktail-party conversation about laxatives, and gives a narrative of the family refrigerator, stocked weekly with nourishment and garbage, that is, frankly, twisted. In short, Strayer’s suspicion/insight seems consistent with Davey’s work as a whole.

    To be fair, it was Davey who first turned the table on Strayer. It may be mock horror, but when Strayer receives Davey’s photograph of a thin slice of a fat biography of Genet on a dinner plate, “with a troubling wash of pink on a napkin,” Strayer exclaims, “Scandale!” It’s Davey’s habit to cut books into portion that will make them more manageable to read, say, on the subway. Strayer may be more reverent, but she’s no less morbid; to illustrate her essay, Strayer sends a snapshot of her unfinished novel lying in state, under a body. Burn, eat, flesh, fuel. Like all writing, diaries consume time, energy, calories, turning life into nourishment for others. Close the book, set it back down on the table, where it turns into a small Surrealist object, a trompe l’oeil stack of books and papers with a plate stashed between the pages. A slim volume, for sure, but make a meal of it.

  • “Stuck Marble.”
    Anne Chu: Animula Vagula Blandula. Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Museeum Haus Lange. Excerpt pp. 46/47-54/55, in German and English.

    Stuck Marble

    It’s summer in Queens, New York. Standing on a table in Anne Chu’s studio is Bust: Young Roman Boy, one of the smaller, more discrete works for her upcoming show in Krefeld, the highlight of which will be an installation of eleven ceramic putti. These are flying around the space, held in place on poles, while Chu continues to build them up, along with the rest of her show. Also in the works is a suite of watercolor drawings that feel like frescos – the paper is so thick – as well as two full-length clay sculptures of children, a boy and a girl, destined for marble pedestals. Not here is a figure of a headless man with a crooked cock being cast in nickel silver bronze at the foundry Chu works with in Switzerland. Another metal job is just back from a fabricator in Belgrade and is spread out on a table in pieces. What started off in the studio as a lacy fabric, roughly hand-stitched over wire armatures, has returned galvanized into aluminum: the putti’s wings, waiting to be attached or rejected.

    Before delving into the work at hand, a quick snapshot of Chu’s studio. Located on the third floor of an industrial building that overlooks the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel, the space is graced with a wall of windows that look out to Manhattan. There’s a large kiln, work tables, a drawing table, a steel-case desk surmounted by a giant computer screen and lots of paperwork, a phalanx of fully loaded bookshelves, a sewing machine, and many arrays of tools and materials, including bins of beautiful fabric. The studio shares a kitchenette with Chu’s neighbor, the painter Paul Bloodgood, whose children Able and Castle are the models for the two figures.

    Chu’s space is set up for studio art, light industry, and craft. It’s a fairly standard admixture of activities for sculptors who, like Chu, approach materials and processes like “objects” of appropriation: there to be lifted and used to make new objects whose potential for meaning will be significantly imbued with and expanded by the original context and references they have been made to physically embody. Since Chu emerged as an artist in the mid-1990s, her sculptural appropriations have been methodically enacted through a range of specific objects (ancient Chinese funerary figures, Tang Dynasty sculptures and landscapes, medieval European tomb sculpture and pageantry, specific works of art by Velázquez and Holbein, Indian miniatures and temple art, illustrated histories by Max von Boehn, King Solomon’s Song of Songs), as well as a full range of materials, crafts, and techniques (chainsawed and hand-carved blocks of wood, ceramic, all kinds of cast metals and resins, machine embroidery on stuffed fabric, digital photography, plaster fresco, printmaking, laser cutting, drawing, painting, sewing). “Whatever it takes to get the job done” might be her studio’s motto. The assorted particulars may be unique, but in its imaginative and physical intelligence, Chu’s work calls to mind that of such peers as Josiah McElheny, Thomas Schütte, and Kiki Smith. As sculptors, all are intensely committed to figuring craft – which they appear to define as an endless spectrum of possible technologies and processes – into works of art that connect past histories, cultures, concepts, with present objects.

    What sets Chu’s studio apart from those of the above are the animals: small bears, a goat, largish birds. These are Chu’s familiars: temporarily orphaned, they come from past bodies of work and may find themselves adopted into future projects. Meanwhile, they perch and mill about. The old horse is giving one of the new putti a ride.

    Let’s go back to that bust on the table, the one of a Roman boy that looks both newly made and freshly excavated – or restored. Soft curls cap the babyishly large head, delicate neck, and breast of a tender youth, whose blank gaze looks onto an ancient past, when sculptures such as this were painted in detail. This sculpture is also colored: to look like a carved piece of rock. Bust: Young Roman Boy employs and embodies a technique for faking marble known as stuc marbre. Utilizing plaster and pigment traditionally bound together with a glue cooked from animal bone, it’s a technique typically used in architecture. Chu specifically associates it with interiors of provincial churches she has visited over the years, killing time while working with her metal foundry in St. Gallen. When she decided to incorporate stuc marbre into her own art, she quickly found that it wasn’t going to be easy to adapt a technique used for decorating a wall into the making of a bust.

    That this would prove a problematic process was evident immediately in her online search: Google translates “stuc marbre” into “stuck marble.” Using other sources, she was able to cobble together enough information to embark on a process that sounds absurdly backward-thinking and laborious, but that Chu considers basic studio practice. On the table, next to the bust, are the first head she built up from layers of black wax and the plaster mold she made from it. (Weirdly lined in silicone, the mold looks as if a rubber mask were embedded in a dried clod of white mud.) Here also are the brushes Chu used to swab and daub the inside of the mold with pigment before filling it with plaster. (“I couldn’t see inside so I had no idea how the color was going on, let alone how it would get pulled onto the surface as it dried.”) And there is the pan of bone glue that got abandoned in the process. (“Just too disgusting.”) Some tools that would not have traditionally been part of the stuc marbre-er’s trade are the electric buggers, which Chu used to polish up her fake marble to a fine sheen.

    Surveying all this stuff and mess, one wonders, why didn’t Chu just carve a head out of a chunk of plaster and paint it? The answer, of course, lies in the sculpture. Geo-illogical: what rock blooms terra-cotta red through bursts of yellow sandstone that have been clouded over by cool gray stone? This painterly aggregate looks no more like a piece of marble than did the walls of those Swiss village churches. But that’s the point. More artificial than natural, Chu’s work represents representation over time, time contained and objectified on every level of her art’s imagery, making, and reception. Bust: Young Roman Boy visually references classical Western art, while physically representing some vernacular decorative tradition that – even if you can’t exactly place it – clearly took time and effort to execute. The pressure of holding all these modes of time together finds its expression in the face of the boy, who purses his mouth shut, opens his eyes wide, bulges out his cheeks, and obstinately endures the alarming process of turning to stone.

    That’s the thing about Chu’s agglomerations of time: instead of seamlessly synthesizing past and present, they appear to burst, erupt, and jam into now. Of the pair of ceramic sculptures of children, the girl seems to have fared a much easier passage than the boy, whose legs appear to have shattered on arrival. Put back together with metal rods, the boy also sports small holes in his head. Step to the side of the two figures, and it’s a different picture: the little girl torques so radically to the right, she’s practically pitched off her pedestal. Plus there is a gaping hole in her back. Chu explains that some of these deformations happened in the firing process; these are large masses of clay for a kiln. The boy was so warped, she needed to cut apart and reconstruct him on that metal armature to literally get him back up on his feet. The holes, it turns out, were all made by Chu; she cut too deep while carving and then just let those gouges be.

    Chu seems to welcome damage. And from the face of things, both children look fine: attentive to the job of keeping still and standing upright, they are wholly present as sculpture. The little girl seems downright pleased with herself, like a slapstick comedian bent ridiculously backward as she managed to stand up casually against gale-force winds. Likewise, Chu routinely pushes her equipment, materials, craft, and ever-newfound techniques beyond the limits of their intended purpose to the point of snapping, breaking, ripping, exploding. Her studio is as much a place of destruction as it is of creation, where brute repairs and tender conservation are just part of the process. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, at the roughness with which Chu handles her work. She demonstrates how the porcelain putti fit together, like dolls or marionettes, by twisting off the heads of one and jamming it back into the empty socket. The ceramic grates as she attempts to get the head to catch hold of the invisible metal armature that is inside each putto. Frustrated, she leaves the head on the floor. Later it occurs that such an impasse, like all of the deliberations and struggle that Chu packs into her art, is just another way of accruing time.

    Swimming in Air

    We speak of the weight of time, but now that her work has been installed in Krefeld, whatever forces moored it to the studio have been untethered, and Chu’s sculptures are positively buoyant. The putti defy gravity, as if the galleries were underwater or high in the air – to zones that the artist has explored aloft and in depth. A certified scuba diver for more than a decade, Chu hired a pilot last winter, during an artist’s residency in the Big Sky Country of Wyoming, to fly her up to photograph the clouds. She considers it lucky the weather was so bad (the pilot offered to postpone the trip): the thunderheads were that magnificent.

    Though the heavens may be the putti’s mythical natural habitat, there is something more aqueous than airy to Chu’s installation. Glazed in drips and veils of color, the sculptures look as if they might have swum or sunk through the watercolor drawings that flow throughout the galleries. In them, awkwardly sketched classical motifs emerge like rubble – along with the occasional monkey – from dreamy washes of color. There is rubble to contend with in the sculpture, too: one of the putti has a foot stuck to its face. Another kiln accident Chu decided to accept, it fragmentarily conjures an entire shipwreck full of antique sculptures lying undisturbed beneath the ocean and becoming coral, until the archaeologist’s dredge transforms them into museum display. Then there is the violence of the spears, or poles, that are holding the putti in place, sometimes invisibly, other times grotesquely or erotically. When you don’t notice the poles, it’s as if the whole installation were a drawing of figures floating in space. But then when you do, the raw physicality of Chu’s sculpture abruptly takes hold.

    Chu did go to Pompeii to see the famous erotic frescoes there. Another funnel of time, travel plays an important role in the collecting of information and experience that her work gives form and shape to. In an ever-ongoing process of research, she travels frequently, ambitiously, out of the blue, and all over the world. The cast male figure is based on a sculpture she photographed in the Hermitage last winter, when a cheap chance to go to Russia materialized. Likewise, she was recently on a boat deep in the Amazon. Over the years, Chu has traveled the globe, especially in Asia, except for Africa, which awaits. What did she bring back from Pompeii? The physical energy of her installation could be traces to those erotic chambers, but otherwise there is no explicit reference – save for an incidental image she took from one of the many trompe l’oeil paintings ornamenting and animating one of the many walls of the many rooms at Pompeii, where Chu noticed a fallen putto dropped to the ground of pictorial space as if it were actually lying on the floor of that ancient room.

    Listen to the smack of that small flesh as it echoes – beautifully and uncomfortably – throughout these pristine white gallery chambers. Chu created this installation specifically for Haus Lange, one of two adjoining houses designed by Mies van der Rohe that are now part of the Kunstmuseen Krefold. A classic work of modern architecture, the last thing these rooms would like to admit is wall decoration, no matter how classical the reference, and especially as it involved babies flashing about; Chu’s putti smack of the “crime” of ornament – along with the related misdemeanors femininity and charm – that Adolf Loos theorized about and Mies designed against. And yet the relationship Chu generates between her installation and Mies’s design is more playfully intelligent than critically academic. Her play goes straight to the bones of his exquisite architecture. Mies’s great achievement with the Barcelona Pavilion (1929) was to design architecture that was completely structural in plan; the Lange and Esters Houses (1928-30) are almost, but not quite, there. They harbor walls that are not load bearing but are purely aesthetic, along with the requisite steel framework. Drawing out these hidden structures into metal lines and putting putti on them may not have been Chu’s intention when she staked out her installation, but it’s certainly one way of extruding a connection from her work into the rooms it wholly inhabits.

    Chu also explicitly references another artist who worked in and out of time: the writer Marguerite Yourcenar. It’s from Yourcenar’s greatest novel, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) – in which she applied the full force of her classical scholarship and modern intellect to projecting readers into antiquity – that Chu draws the title of her exhibition. Animula vagula blandula is the first line of a poem by the Roman emperor, used as an epigraph for his mausoleum and cited by Yourcenar: “Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore.” Readers of the novel will associate the “little soul” with Hadrian’s lover, the Greek boy Antinous (who commits suicide rather than grow old and out of favor), or with the emperor himself (once a boy whose portrait was no doubt carved as a bust). For viewers of this exhibition, it’s the sculptural putti and children that will absorb the poem’s associations: amiable, roving, unbending, and bare, they fill this empty house, voided of its former distractions, with forces, fragments, and figures of time.

    In so doing, Chu’s art performs a useful function. Because her sculptures pack such a random and precise range of references, they don’t permit us to entertain the notion that the past is settled, the present is known, and it’s time to move on. Because her art is so aggressively decorative and physical at once, its presence arrests attention and disrupts time. Because it comes to us as if thrown over the transom or pushed through the wall of time, Chu’s work imagines a future in which our capacity for being in the present has been radically expanded by all there is to absorb. And who can envision what – in time – will suddenly come of that? We live in an era of “retromania,” observes the music critic Simon Reynolds, who coined the term, which rings with impatience, within a contemporary culture jammed on replay. In light of the historicism of Chu’s work, one wonders whether perhaps this culture has too narrow a bandwidth. Yes, it’s hard to imagine what great things will come of parsing and paraphrasing the hits (in music and in art) of the past few decades from a tiny sliver of the world. On the other hand, given the exponential expansion of our cultural field as it now exists digitally and globally, one might ask, what’s the big hurry?