Installation view of Salotto – Villa Panza Museum, Varese, Italy
(l to r) Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Untitled 130, 1987-1988
Multilayered oil on Oyster linen, 60 x 60 inches
Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Untitled 121, 1984-1985
Multilayered oil on Oyster linen, 66 x 60 inches
The Panza Collection (Photo: David Sotnik)

Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, 1923-2010

“Most people who have any interest in Post-War American art, whether Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Environmental Art, Conceptualism or Monochromism have heard of the great Italian art collector, Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. In many ways a modern day Medici, Count Panza passed away at age 87 in Milan on April 24, 2010.

Together with his wife, Giovanna, and with enormous love, courage, forsight and brilliance, the Panzas amassed three distinct collections totaling 2500 works from the mid -1950′s to the present, mostly of American art. They mostly liked to acquire in depth from mature artists who were as yet not well known but would later be recognized as the major artists of their era. These included such figures as Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Irwin, Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Cy Twombly, Richard Long, Lawrence Weiner, James Turrell, Roni Horn, Martin Puryear, Lawrence Carroll and many many others. The Panzas were, in fact, the first major collectors of these artists and signaled to others that these artists were important. Their vast acquisitions influenced American and world art history and art markets profoundly, as well as enhancing the collections of several American museums such as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshorn…”

Dan Flavin, the nominal three (to William of Ockham), 1963
Daylight fluorescent light

November 5 – December 19, 2009

David Zwirner presents Dan Flavin: Series and Progressions, the
first exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery since having announced its
representation of the Estate of Dan Flavin.

From 1963, when he conceived the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi), a single gold, fluorescent lamp that hangs on a diagonal on the wall—a work which marks the artist’s first use of fluorescent light alone, until his death in 1996, Flavin produced a singularly consistent and prodigious body of work that utilized commercially available fluorescent lamps to create installations of light and color.

Curated by Tiffany Bell, this exhibition will examine Flavin’s use of progressions and serial structures, ideas that were central to the artist’s practice throughout his career. Flavin has been credited with being “one of the first artists to make use of a basically progressional procedure,” and the systematic arrangement of color and light fixtures was an aspect of his work that not only led to it being characterized as Minimal art but which moreover influenced Conceptual artistic practices.

On view will be the nominal three (to William of Ockham), 1963, an installation that was of seminal importance to the artist’s body of work, in that it was the first work by Flavin to explore a systematic procedure. Here, Flavin has extended the primary unit of fluorescent light into a serial, additive system that consists of six fluorescent lamps (in three vertical sets, grouped as one, two, and three lamps). As Michael Govan explains, the nominal three “is at the crux of Flavin’s emerging practice. The vertically-oriented single fixture in white, known as one
[according to a drawing by the artist], must have been considered a reduction to the simplest of formulations. Yet Flavin’s final resolution involved three sets of lights, a series rather than a consolidated whole, which realized the possibilities implicit in the first diagonal—that it could be extended endlessly…the nominal three was not a fixed composition, but rather a concept—whose premise had enormous implications for a form of art that could be drawn out from an idea.” The work is dedicated to the Medieval English theologian and philosopher known for expounding the methodological principle (“Ockham’s Razor”) of forming a hypothesis based on the most concise means possible.

Flavin would continue to explore themes of seriality in a number of key works, including his “barriers,” which literally extend the notion of potentially endless repeatability into the exhibition space. The exhibition will include untitled (to
Helga and Carlo, with respect and affection), 1974, a work configured in a modular sequence of square units that dramatically bathes the surrounding space in blue light. Here, the artist has constructed a fence-like structure of
fluorescent lamps that cuts across the length of a room and disrupts the surrounding architecture. Part of a series of four related “barriers” (created in blue, pink, yellow, and green), this work has not been exhibited since it was first on view in 1975 in a solo presentation of Flavin’s work at the Kunsthalle Basel (fünf Installationen in fluoreszierendem Licht von Dan Flavin); the dedication is to Carlo Huber, who was the director of the Kunsthalle Basel, and his wife Helga.

Filling one of the galleries at David Zwirner (the 519 West 19th Street space) will be a large-scale work that Flavin originally created for his first solo museum exhibition. In 1967, the artist devised an arithmetically expanding system of
8-foot lamps that were placed vertically along the available gallery walls of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Titled alternating pink and “gold,” the installation was comprised of alternating units of pink and gold fluorescent light, installed at progressively larger intervals from one another, beginning at the center of each wall: two lamps (one pink, one yellow) were placed at the mid-point of each wall; then single lamps of alternating colors were placed on both sides of the pair, spaced at intervals of 2 feet, 4 feet, 6 feet, etc. – as many times as space allowed.

The recreation at David Zwirner presents one of the earliest examples of installation art: encompassing all available walls of the gallery, alternating pink and “gold” produces an immersive, site-situational environment of light and
color.

Also on view will be the nine works from 1968 that belong to a series titled two primary series and one secondary. Comprised of three sets of three works (one set in red and yellow fluorescent light; the second in red and blue; and
the third in red and green), each set is composed of a cumulative system of vertical lamps. While they each stand alone as individual works, these constructions demonstrate Flavin’s interest in serial and permutational configurations. This series was first shown in its entirety at Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich in 1968, and a complete group of all nine works is in the collection of the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main.

Flavin employed systematic compositions throughout his career, and the exhibition will include a group of late works from 1990 that project a sequential color arrangement into space: untitled (for John Heartfield) 3a-d forms a series of four individual works. While each of these works are arranged in the same construction of vertical and perpendicular lamps, they are distinctly organized in terms of a progression defined by the artist’s employment of color.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the gallery will publish an extensive monograph devoted to the artist’s work in collaboration with Steidl, Göttingen. The publication will contain rare archival documentation and new scholarship on
the artist by contributors that include Tiffany Bell and will be available in spring 2010.

The third volume in Ridinghouse’s series of anthologies on the central figures of Minimalism, About Robert Ryman offers a crucial look at the artist. The book charts the gradual evolution of the reception of and reaction to Ryman’s art. Texts include critical responses from his very first solo exhibition to present. A comprehensive selection of over 60 essays and exhibition reviews has been collated into one volume, including texts by some of the most influential art historians and critics. This volume includes an introduction discussing Ryman’s reception throughout history by Vittorio Colaizzi, author of the upcoming Phaidon monograph on Robert Ryman. Other titles in the series include About Carl Andre and Dan Flavin: It Is What It Is. Writers include Yve-Alain Bois, Douglas Crimp, Arthur C. Danto, Donald B. Kuspit, Lucy R. Lippard, Barbara Rose and Roberta Smith. Some essays appear here in English for the first time.

Ridinghouse is the publishing imprint shared by London gallerists Thomas Dane and Karsten Schubert producing books, prints and multiples.

ISBN 978 1 905464 09 8

 

Click to purchase on Amazon

In this first book-length study of Robert Ryman, Suzanne Hudson traces the artist’s production from his first paintings in the early 1950s, many of which have never been exhibited or reproduced, to his more recent gallery shows. Ryman’s largely white-on-white paintings represent his careful working over of painting’s conventions at their most radically reduced. Through close readings of the work, Hudson casts Ryman as a painter for whom painting was conducted as a continuous personal investigation. Ryman’s method—an act of “learning by doing”—as well as his conception of painting as “used paint” set him apart from second-generation abstract expressionists, minimalists, or conceptualists.

Ryman (born in 1930) is a self-taught artist who began to paint in earnest while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1950s. Hudson argues that Ryman’s approach to painting developed from quotidian contact with the story of modern painting as assembled by MoMA director and curator Alfred Barr and rendered widely accessible by director of the education department Victor D’Amico and colleagues. Ryman’s introduction to artistic practice within the (white) walls of MoMA, Hudson contends, was shaped by an institutional ethos of experiential learning. (Others who worked at MoMA during these years include Lucy Lippard, who married Ryman in 1961; Dan Flavin, another guard; and Sol LeWitt, a desk assistant.)

Hudson’s chapters—”Primer,” “Paint,” “Support,” “Edge,” and “Wall,” named after the most basic elements of the artist’s work—eloquently explore Ryman’s ongoing experiment in what makes a painting a painting. Ryman’s work, Hudson argues, tests the medium’s material and conceptual possibilities. It neither signals the end of painting nor guarantees its continued longevity but keeps the prospect of painting an open question, answerable only through the production of new paintings.

An October Book.

About the Author
Suzanne P. Hudson is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

Sorry, but this is too funny not to post.

“A year ago, Artnet News published a light-hearted piece on a music video by former Destiny’s Child singer Kelly Rowland, which set the pop star’s gyrations amid florescent light environments, and clearly owed a debt to the work of the late minimalist Dan Flavin. Well, not everyone thought the reference was so amusing. John Silberman, of the law firm that represents the Flavin estate, writes to say that the similarities actually led to legal action — and that as a consequence Sony BMG and the production company Partizan Entertainment “have agreed not to make any further use of the video.”

And, indeed, it appears that the offending Philip Andelman-directed clip for Rowland’s single Work has been yanked from YouTube and MTV.com (as of this posting, the full video still appears on something called wat.tv, for those who are interested). According to Silberman, the settlement also involves monetary damages for the Flavin estate, though of an undisclosed amount.” — ArtNet Magazine, April 21, 2009

 

Works by Burgoyne Diller

January 23 – March 6, 2009

Featuring artists Matthias Bitzer, Liz Deschenes, Burgoyne Diller, Dan Flavin, Raymond Hains, Yuichi Higashionna , Gregor Hildebrandt, Akira Kanayama, Barbara Kasten, Camilla Low, Sherrie Levine, Kasimir Malevich, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Anthony Pearson, Florian Pumhosl, R.H. Quaytman, Eileen Quinlan, Anselm Reyle, Alexander Rodchenko, Haim Steinbach, Frank Stella & Katja Strunz.

 

Allied Works Architecture
Maryhill Overlook, 1999
Photo by Sally Schoolmaster 

“Brad Cloepfil is the principal of Allied Works Architecture in Portland, Oregon. Allied Works is a nationally recognized architecture firm that has recently completed projects like the extension to the Seattle Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis and is currently finishing the Museum of Art & Design at 2 Columbus Circle in New York. PORT recently sat down with him to ask about the impact artists have had on his work.

 

PORT: How did your early experience with art feedback into your own creative process as an architect?

 

Brad Cloepfil: When I was younger, I tended to be influenced by the raw experience of the work itself. At first, I wasn’t even aware of who created a work, whether it was Richard Serra or Robert Irwin, it was the experience of the work itself that was important. The experience makes you ask yourself about the spatial quality of that type of work and about the ideas that those artists are exploring. It just resonates with you. I wasn’t seeing anything comparable in buildings. It just seems like those guys understood more about the intentions of the 19th and 20th century architecture than the architects did. They had clarity of thought and a practice that was built on the exploration of material that became very important to me. The singular act of focus to create a work of art was really impressive. I saw Richard Serra’s Circuit at MoMA and it is just four pieces of steel propped up in the corners of the room. The physical presence and the mass of the steel and its ability to radiate space into the small gallery was for me a very architectural experience that I could relate to much easier than the so-called “architecture” that was being produced at that time. The experience is about the material and the way that the material is made. It was also easier to learn from the artists because their work is so pure. By that I mean, the work that I was interested in was focused on the exploration of only one or two ideas…?”

 

PORT is dedicated to catalyzing critical discussion and disseminating information about art as lensed through Portland, Oregon.

 

Click to purchase on Amazon.com

This book examines a seminal 1964 Dan Flavin exhibition at New York’s influential (though short-lived) Green Gallery, which broke new ground–and marked a turning-point in the artist’s career–with the first series of works composed of colored fluorescent light tubes. The exhibition included seminal works like “the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Robert Rosenblum)” (1963) and “a primary picture” (1964). This volume coincides with Zwirner & Wirth’s recreation of the Green Gallery installation–the first in a series of projects that will explore the presentation and influence of historical gallery shows of the twentieth century. Along with new scholarship by Jeffrey Weiss, former Director of the Dia Art Foundation, this volume contains new color plates, a selection of drawings tracing the development of Flavin’s ideas about these works and their original installation, rare archival photographs, reproductions of exhibition reviews and a selection of recently commissioned statements by artists and critics who saw the exhibition.

 

May 4 — June 14, 2008

Gering & López Gallery presents an exhibition of work by Dan Flavin and Josef Albers. Pairing two highly influential artists of the 20th Century, the exhibition will allow the viewer to rediscover, evaluate and place into a new context these very diverse materializations of color and line. Though Albers and Flavin used vastly different approaches, both challenged the function of perception and went on to make significant contributions to the history of art. Albers, the Modernist, blurred the line between fine and applied art and employed traditional painting methods to conduct pioneering experiments in color theory and composition. Flavin, the Conceptualist, defied convention by using commercially available fluorescent lights and placing authenticity in the viewer’s mind rather than the artist’s hand. Both utilized architecture and the ability of the human eye to animate their color theories.

 

February 1 — October 4, 2008

The focus of this exhibition is the experience of Dan Flavin’s work – sculptural installations composed of mass-produced light fixtures and fluorescent tubes – within the architecture and shifting natural light of the Pulitzer building.

 

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1971
Anodized aluminum, Collection Walker Art Center, 
Gift of the T.B. Walker Foundation, 1971

May 15, 2008 — July 12, 2009 

Joseph Beuys, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd were contemporaries of thought rather than form. Each took sculpture off its pedestal—literally and figuratively—and expanded the conventions of what constitutes a work of art, influencing scores of artists to do the same. Grouping Beuys, Flavin, and Judd in a new exhibition from the Walker’s collection provides “a snapshot of a vital moment in postwar cultural production,” says assistant curator Yasmil Raymond, and allows viewers to trace the influence of their ideas in contemporary art. “With this exhibition, visitors will see three different ‘statements’ that reflect distinct positions towards art-making and the ways in which these artists addressed the autonomy of art, its nature, and its social power. These are concerns that this generation of artists set in motion and continue to have relevance for artists today.”

 

Installation view at Zwirner & Wirth

“Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books. Unless someone has the time, money and obsession to regather the work, research how it appeared and rehang a show — and the Zwirner & Wirth gallery has all those things, plus the understanding that forays into recent history burnish the reputation…“

 

March 6 — May 3, 2008

 

Dan Flavin, Untitled (to Jan & Ron Greendberg), 1972-73

November 16, 2007 — February 24, 2008

The Panza Collection: An Experience of Color and Light includes more than seventy works of art from the Panza Collection, which is now dispersed in Varese, Verona, New York, and Los Angeles. In consultation with Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, whose vision has guided the project from the start, Gallery Director Louis Grachos and Senior Curator Douglas Dreishpoon have selected the objects and artists to be featured.

Color and light are the key concepts used to select and organize this exhibition, which explores the use of these elements by artists from the 1960s to the present. Beginning with artworks by pioneers in the use of actual light – fluorescent light in works by Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin, and Bruce Nauman’s use of neon light – the exhibition continues to the present with the visual light embodied in monochromatic paintings and sculptures by such artists as Daniel Levine, David Simpson, Phil Sims, Anne Truitt, and Anne Appleby. The exhibition not only traces this historical development of color and light in contemporary art, it also illuminates the continuing evolution of Panza’s philosophic interest in these elements, as realized in many of the works of art he has collected since 1956. A discrete installation is devoted to each of the sixteen artists, highlighting Panza’s penchant for collecting an artist’s work in-depth and allowing for more concentrated study of each artist included.

 

September 22 — October 10, 2007

In this current exhibition Untitled (To Dan Flavin), Salvatore Panatteri is transforming the virtually ‘invisible’, or non-colour, into concrete form so it becomes the focal point of his work. Produced by exposing sheets of photographic paper to the colour temperature of fluorescent light, the resulting series of monochromatic works look at the implication of light to the given environment.

 

Installation view

August 3-24, 2007

“We see squares of colour, a hue, a hint of what we imagine alludes to the existence of some other thing. Something that is other than what is unambiguously in this instance light, or better, its effect on a chemical process, leaving what we hope to construe as marks or traces of reference on a surface that we call photography. For what Salvatore Panatteri’s new work entails is simply that, the process of the effect of light in itself reacting chemically on photographic paper. These works are squares of photographic paper that are exposed in a darkroom to the light source, the specific properties of which are those of the colour temperature of fluorescent lights. What eventuates is chemically constructed, so to speak, by the vagaries of this condition of a light source affecting the medium. Simply put, this is done without any other intermediary source….” — Vicente Butron (excerpt from exhibition catalog)

 

 

Ward Jackson at Kay-Mar Gallery, NY, 1964
Transit & Garden 1 (left to right)

 

Quite simply, you have to know about Ward Jackson and his work — he was an innovative abstract painter, a maverick editor and arts administrator, and a key member of New York City’s artist community.  I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Ward’s nephew, artist Julian Jackson, about his uncle’s life and work.  Our discussion that follows is published on the occasion of Ward Jackson’s first retrospective exhibition, taking place at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, NY, from April 27 – June 2, 2007.

 

Matthew Deleget: The first time I learned of Ward Jackson’s work was just a few years ago.  I was walking down the ramp at the Guggenheim Museum taking in the Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) exhibition, seeing all the usual work by all the usual suspects, when I was stopped in my tracks by an incredible lozenge-shaped painting, a small one, installed on a short wall near the elevator bank.  It was a work by Ward Jackson and it was slipped into the exhibition by one of the Guggenheim’s curators on account of the fact that Jackson had recently died, age 75.  As I poured over his painting, I wondered to myself, who is Ward Jackson?  So, Julian, maybe you can help me answer that question, who was he?

 

Julian Jackson: That’s really a big, if short, question. He was a painter, a writer, an editor, an archivist, an opinionated observer, a passionate viewer, and was deeply engaged, his whole life, with art. Most of all, Ward Jackson was a real New Yorker, the kind who outgrows a small town, and follows his dreams to the big city.

His early interest in art and his restless intellectual curiosity led him, via art magazines, to a precocious interest in abstraction that had to have been pretty rare in his rural hometown of Petersburg, VA, in the 1930s and 40s. While studying painting at the Richmond Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University), he began a pivotal correspondence with Hilla Rebay, the curator for the Guggenheim family who had recently launched the Museum of Non-Objective Art, which, of course, later became the Guggenheim Museum. She encouraged him to send sketches, which she would review offering comment. I can imagine him eagerly waiting for the return mail! Her interest in his work, which meant so much to him, fostered both his life-long interest in the complexities of the figure/ground relationship in abstract painting and his scholarly interest in the early development of abstraction.  When he neared graduation, she offered him a job at the Guggenheim.   After a period of study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, MA, Ward finally settled in New York and took her up on it.

He started in the mailroom where he worked with Dan Flavin (who later dedicated a light piece that curled down the ramp to him ) before the Frank Lloyd Wright building was completed, and worked through various positions until becoming the archivist in the early 70s. In that position he remained an active part of that institution until his retirement in 1996, though even then he was called upon for projects and maintained desk space in a series of ever smaller nooks of Leiderkranz Hall, the rambling building on 86th Street that housed the archives at that time. For instance, when the cafe was remodeled in the late 90s, Ward curated the photographs that still hang there as a visual history of the museum.

The last time he and I went to the Guggenheim together was in the summer of 2003. Matthew Barney’s vast project was in the rotunda then, but we had come to see the exhibition of Malevich’s brilliant early work that was installed in an upstairs gallery. Ward knew well the intricacies of the building, and led me through a bewildering series of back offices and staircases so as to avoid the Barney. Everyone knew him and he had the run of the place. Before reaching the gallery, we passed an open door, which briefly revealed the rotunda. Ward held his hand beside his face to block out the view and hurried forward to view unsullied the distant idealism of the early Malevich. As a true believer in abstraction, he felt that the Guggenheim had gradually lost its moorings, sense of mission, and drifted far from its founding ethos under Baroness Rebay. This sense of traditionalism set him apart from many of his contemporaries, but was a deep part of him and deeply informed his work. We left the Malevich via another circuitous back way heading to the basement so that Ward could empty his bulging mailbox into his own equally and always bulging shoulder bag. It was the last time that he would visit place he knew and loved so well.

He passed away early in 2004, and Lisa Dennison, who curated Singular Forms, and who had known him at the museum since the 70s, generously included that painting that you saw in the exhibition. At the opening a large group of friends and colleagues gathered there sharing wine and memories. That corner of the ramp that night felt like a crowded opening in a small gallery. I know Ward must have felt right at home.

Well, that’s a long answer to your short question, and it really only touches on one side of him. Ward was certainly passionate about his job, but most of all, thought of himself as a painter and his work will be the focus of the exhibition at Metaphor.

 

Ward Jackson
Composition, 1948
Oil on masonite, 24 x 18 inches

MD: That was an inspired answer.  Ward is clearly someone that continues to inspire you and inform your work – both as an artist and director of a gallery.  Maybe you can tell me about your experience coming of age as an artist.  How and when did you realize your uncle was an artist?  How did he impact your world-view and development?

 

JJ:  Well, art must be in the genes because I was drawn to it. I was always drawing from an early age. We had a good small museum in Richmond where I grew up and my parents often took us there after church on Sunday. Maybe that’s why I still think of art as possessing a sort of spiritual component. Anyway, my grandmother lived nearby the museum so we would sometimes swing by her house afterwards for lunch. Her dark old Victorian townhouse house was chock full of Ward’s early work from the late 40s and early 50s.  She stored it for him all over her walls. To me, my grandmother’s house felt like an extension of the museum and I loved roaming through the cluttered hallways looking for his paintings.

Among his student works were the paintings he had made while studying with Hans Hofmann, and in them, there is a free, gestural energy added to his interest in figure / ground. I loved those paintings, and to this day, keep my favorite one on a wall in my studio. Of course, I had met Ward at family holiday gatherings, but he was an adult, quiet, and didn’t have much to do with the kids. Still, I loved the idea that we had an artist in the family and felt a real kinship with him just from looking at his paintings.

As I grew older and more serious about art, the idea that art could actually be a career was made more tangible by his example. I was kind of in awe of the fact that he worked at a great museum, painted seriously, and lived in New York. In the early 70s, as I was finishing high school, Ward had a one-man show at the Virginia Museum.  It was the first opening I ever went to and it was great. He was showing the bright, reduced abstractions of his Virginia Rivers series, squares of pure color bisected by contrasting colors on active diagonals. These paintings blended tough abstraction with pop color and were very challenging. By this time I felt confident enough to talk to Ward about his paintings and, in a sense, that conversation put me on the road I’m still on as a painter and curator myself.

During that period Ward had also been regularly sending me copies of the publication that he and two partners had started called Art Now New York. It was a three-fold folio containing 8 1/2 x 11 inch reproductions of work recently exhibited in New York, accompanied by statements from the artists. In the four-year run of Art Now (which later morphed into the Gallery Guide), they published everyone from DeKooning and Jasper Johns to Brice Marden and Robert Smithson. It was a window into the art world for me as a young student and a great introduction to a bunch of interesting artists and their thought processes. I would love to see Art Now compiled into a book project because, looking back, the four years of its run (1968–72) were a moment of extraordinary ferment in American art with Pop, Color Field, Minimalist, and Earthwork artists all sharing the stage with an older generation of sculptors and painters. These folios reflect the energy in that mix. In many cases the statements that Ward solicited and edited are absolutely seminal primary statements by some of the really significant artists of that period.

When I began traveling to New York as an art student, Ward would let me stay in his wonderfully cluttered studio on Union Square. He would set me up with a Gallery Guide underlined with his choice of shows that he thought I should see and would usually take me through whatever was showing at the Guggenheim. He was a great source of information and inspiration.

 

Ward Jackson
Rite of Spring, 1952
Oil on canvas

MD: I would like to talk a bit more in-depth about Ward’s early years, in particular his time spent with Hans Hofmann.  As you know, Hofmann had a reputation for being enormously generous as a teacher and had profound impact on modern art in America.  What do you think Ward took away from his studies with Hofmann?

 

JJ: In order to fully answer that question, I should back up a little bit to Ward’s student years. I mentioned the correspondence with curator and painter Hilla Rebay, which sharpened his interest in figure / ground relationships of the sort found in late Kandinsky. This connection led in 1948 to an invitation by George L.K. Morris to exhibit with the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group in their 11th annual exhibition in New York. This opportunity, coming when Ward was just twenty, led to a lifelong, close, and collegial friendship between the two men.  Morris was himself a painter and writer.  He was the first art critic for the Partisan Review, a founding member of the AAA, and an outspoken supporter for the development of abstract art in America. Twenty-three years older than my uncle, Morris became something of a mentor to him, encouraging him in his studies and earliest professional opportunities.

Though tempered with his own restless approach to mark-making, this period of Ward’s development clearly shows the influence of his contact with these two powerful advocates for a type of homegrown abstraction employing a shallow cubist division of space and floating isolated shapes that was very much a part of the critical stance of the AAA at that time. In this period he also toyed with Surrealist automatism in a series of small-scaled works in egg tempera on panel.

This tight and cerebral approach to artmaking was given a good shake in the sunshine when he earned the chance to study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown during the summer of 1952. Hofmann’s insistence on an art based in the study of nature and grounded in exhaustive experience with drawing and composition brought to Ward’s work a looser, organic energy and heightened ambiguity of space. The experience of working outside, close to the sea and the primal landscape of the seashore with its omnipresent horizon obviously touched a nerve with Ward.  It was something he returned to again and again, and it informed his work in various ways for years to come. For the rest of the 1950s, Ward turned his back on the earlier Neo-Plastic styles that preoccupied him as an undergraduate student and plunged into the orbits forming around the key gestural painters of the time, particularly Kline and DeKooning. In this way his contact with Hans Hofmann was critical because through his summer of work with him, he was pulled from the one camp, with its foot firmly planted in styles linked to the 1930s and thrust into confrontation with the dominant aesthetics of his own moment.

 

Ward Jackson
Red Vertical, c. 1956-57
Oil on canvas, 57 x 49 inches

MD:  As a young artist, Ward had a number of ongoing “mentor” relationships with established individuals, such as Rebay, Morris, and Hofmann, and he participated in an exhibition with the members of AAA, most of whom I assume were older and more well-known in the artist community. You did say, however, that it was Hoffman who pushed Ward into the “aesthetics of his own moment.”  I would like to know a more about this.  Who were some of the younger artists, with whom Ward developed friendships at this time, the artists of his generation?

 

JJ: To tell you the truth, I know less about this period of his life partly because I was barely walking at the time and partly because Ward talked about that time in his life less than others. At this point I’m very sorry that I didn’t sit down with him sometime specifically to learn more about that important juncture in his life. Like most artists, Ward was more interested in the present than the past and, by the time the two of us were starting to become close, more than twenty years had passed since he had studied with Hofmann.

What I do know is that he moved to New York in 1952, and began his life as an artist in earnest. Over the next ten years, he explored and expanded upon the gestural style of land / cityscape based abstraction that he had first dug into with Hofmann. He was part of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists and, like so many other of his peers, he began his exhibiting career in New York as part of the 10th Street scene of cooperative galleries that grew up around Irving Sandler’s pioneering Tanager Gallery. The tenth street co-ops provided important alternative exhibition opportunities for the flock of younger artists who, like Ward, were drawn to New York in the post-WWII period.

Most of these artists were working in some variation of the abstract and semi-abstract styles one associates with that period. The big players of that moment like Pollock, Kline, Newman, Rothko, and DeKooning were dominating both the scene and the uptown galleries so the downtown co-ops, many of which were artist-run, played an important role in nurturing younger artists. Artists as diverse as Allan Kaprow and Philip Pearlstein, Mark di Suvero and Alice Neel, Al Held and Yayoi Kusama, and hundreds of others all benefited from the support and early exposure provided by these rough and tumble, do-it-yourself spaces.

New York in the 50s must have been a great place to be a young painter with its heated air of intense debate and discussion and Ward was there. He had his first solo exhibitions in the mid 50s at the Fleischman Gallery, just around the corner on 9th Street. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find out much about that gallery. If anyone reading this could give me more information about it, I’d be grateful. I have no doubt that Ward was a keen observer of the scene, as well as participant, and made many acquaintances there that followed him through his long tenure in the art world. One friend from those years that he often mentioned was Judith Rothschild.

 

MD: Judith Rothschild was an abstract painter and active in the artist community.  She was also a member and later President of American Abstract Artists.  Tell me more about his relationship with her.

 

JJ: Well, this brings us to some of the interesting contradictions of Ward’s life. Judith Rothschild was indeed a serious artist, a good one, and was very involved as a supporter in the 10th Street scene and, as you said, the American Abstract Artists. She was also a wealthy heiress, well able to support her art life. Ward, whose salary at the Guggenheim was modest at best, and whose lifestyle was always marked by utter frugality, was, throughout his life, fascinated by and drawn to the wealthy. George L.K. Morris, his wife artist Suzy Frelinghuysen, and Judith Rothschild were longtime friends and colleagues with whom Ward spent a great deal of time through the years in mutual critique and discussion of both their own works and larger movements in the artworld.

 

Ward Jackson
Bridge, 1963
Oil on canvas, 34 x 34 inches

MD: This background information, particularly about an artist’s formative years, is always so critical in terms of understanding where an artist is coming from, his/her point of view, and overall value system.  It is a great segue into the work he was making in the 1960s, the work that first brought him to the broader attention of his peers and the greater art world.  How did Ward arrive at making hard-edge geometric abstraction in the early 1960s and what territory did he specifically stake out for himself?

 

JJ:  Like many members of his generation, Ward was also struggling to find his own voice. The fevered energies of Abstract Expressionism were beginning to sputter by the late 50s. Rauschenberg and John’s were already, by the mid-50s, pushing back against the overheated dominance of gestural painting by infusing its tropes with ironic detachment. Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers were looking for new ways to bring imagery back into painting. Ellsworth Kelly had recently returned from Paris charged with a freshened approach to pure color abstraction and Al Held had embarked on his series of huge paintings based on simplified letter forms. Ad Reinhardt was deeply engaged in the process of clearing his work of the marking and emotionalism that colored so much work of the later 1950s, and the ground-clearing work of Barnett Newman was also becoming better understood. These streams of activity were clearly informed by a heightened criticality in pointing the way toward the developments of the 60s and the cooler sensibilities that came into play in that period.

Ward responded to this crux moment with a body of work, the black and white diamonds, that marked the arrival of his mature style and laid out certain themes and approaches that would engage him for the rest of his life. Beginning in 1959 or so, his notebook drawings show him experimenting with the diamond as a framing device for calligraphic linear abstractions. Over the next couple of years in dozens of drawings, he begins to respond more directly to the tough formal and symmetrical imperatives of the diamond format itself, gradually developing a set of tightly balanced compositions that utilize its radial stability and echo its prominent diagonals. Transit, the painting that you mentioned at the very beginning of our talk and that was included in the Singular Forms show at the Guggenheim, is a good example of his breakthrough work. The diamond-shaped, ‘square on end’ canvas is first divided by a broad central white vertical band that overlaps, or cuts through, two centrally-stacked black diamonds. At the left and right hand corners of this shaped canvas, smaller diamonds in black are separated from the core by white outlines the same thickness as the ‘spine’. The result, though starkly graphic, is a subtle and ambiguous play of overlapping planes in a relatively small and tightly compacted space.

Ward first showed these pieces in an exhibition at the Kay-Mar Gallery in 1964, in which he shared the walls with a remarkable group of artists — Dan Flavin, Jo Baer, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt.  The hierarchic and emblematic inner geometries contained in this and the other paintings of this series set Ward’s work slightly at odds with the heightened material concerns of many of his peers in the exhibition. In a sense he was looking back to earlier, more pictoral iterations of abstraction while his fellows were busily staking out the more reductive strategies of Minimalism. Ward’s sense of scholarship and painterly lineage ran deep, and throughout his subsequent career, he honored them with his own personal, sometimes idiosyncratic approach to pictorial space and the problems posed by figure / ground relationships. He would often tell me in later years, “Mondrian only painted 13 diamonds.” Clearly he felt that the great master of Neo-Plastic painting had only scratched the surface of the possibilities contained within the prismatic confines of that difficult format.

Ward was devoted to the ideals of Mondrian, though his own work for the most part eschewed rigorous Neo-Plastic conventions. And like Mondrian, whose early works in particular showed the influence of his spiritual engagement with Theosophy, Ward’s work was to some extent colored by his own spiritual studies. Ward practiced Kriya yoga, a meditation technique focused on the transformation of physical energy to spiritual energy by visualizing its movement up the spine and outward. From the earliest black and white diamonds, Ward was interested in the primary vertical structure of the form, and its reinforced cruciform symmetry lent itself to the punchy diagrammatic nature of some of his more mandala-like paintings, especially in later diamond works from the 80s and 90s.

 

Ward Jackson
Virginia Rivers Series: Winona, 1972
Acrylic on canvas

MD: To continue that train of thought, how did Ward’s work change and develop into the 80s and 90s?  For instance, I’ve heard he was constantly making drawings on index cards, a couple of which I’ve seen recently in American Abstract Artist exhibitions.  How would you characterize his late work?

 

JJ: Beginning in the 50s, Ward established the practice of his ‘drawing books’ as he called them, small 4 x 6 inch pads that he always carried in his jacket pockets. On each page he would line off six squares or diamonds and, in these little spaces barely more than a square inch or two in size, work out in serial fashion the ideas that would later become paintings. In this way he could work whenever he wanted and wherever he was. These sketchbooks were an important part of his process and it has been fascinating for me to go through them as I have become more familiar with his linear development. I’ve been able to see how he would gnaw on an idea sometimes over a span of years, before committing it to canvas. This helps explain the fully resolved constructions of the paintings, as well as sheds some light on the sometimes-hermetic nature of his imagery.

As I described earlier, Ward’s work throughout his life swung on a pendulum from inner concerns to outward observation resolved in formal terms and back again. There was always a tension between the seen and the imagined, but as he moved into the 80s and 90s, the free play of ideas, as evidenced in the pages of the drawing books, became more personal and less programmatic. He developed various series simultaneously and within the self-imposed confines of his chosen format was able to engage a wide range of thematic material. One key theme that I have touched on are the group of mandala-like diamonds. Ward was plagued with various health problems during those years and his inherently spiritual approach to artmaking found a deepened release in these paintings, which often featured a rising central axis that, widening as it rose, emulated his positive meditations. This impulse was also at the core of his ‘ladder’ series, which actually began with a group of studies of his view of the World Trade Towers. Those iconic towers, which he could see from the window of his studio, fascinated him with their soaring verticals framing a clear center shaft of sky. At night he was interested in the rung–like arrangements of lit and unlit floors against the darkened night sky. The metaphor of ascendance was an important one in his work, the yearning to transcend the physical. The ‘ladder’ pieces sort of reconciled his key interests as they were based on his close observation and experience of the city, and yet, were also expressive of his personal brand of spirituality.

In his last works, the ‘opening space’ group, Ward returned to more strictly formal concerns exploring once again the unique particularities of space within the diamond format. These are among the most rigorous and successful of his works in this form, I think, reflective of his years of wrangling with it. On their face these final drawings, and the one painting that was their result (Homage to Mondrian, 2001 – 2003), are composed of just two broad bars of color, one an elongate rectangle hugging the lower left edge of the canvas, the other swung upward as if hinged to form a raised horizontal axis bisecting the canvas left to right slightly above center. These bars carve the space and seem to push it to the right creating tension within the diamond while dividing it into four separate and discrete areas of color, each with a different shape and volume. The result has a tough, elegant pictoral logic that pays a final debt to his brilliant precursor.

 

Ward Jackson
Homage to Mondrian, 2001-03
Acrylic on canvas, 34 x 34 inches

MD: During Ward’s last twenty years, you clearly shared an increasingly close relationship with him, which was precisely the same time you came of age as an abstract painter.  You were undoubtedly well-versed in his ideas, process, and practice.  So, on a more personal note Julian, what was Ward’s influence on your own work as a emerging painter?  I think it is also worth mentioning here that you are currently the Secretary of American Abstract Artists, a position long occupied by your uncle.

 

JJ: Growing up in the suburbs of Richmond, VA, where all adults seemed to be either moms or insurance men, it was tremendously liberating to know that such a thing as ‘artist living in New York’ was actually a career option. I learned a great deal from him and have been inspired through the years by the toughness of his conviction and the purity of his persistence. Ward never achieved fame or great fortune, but his work as a painter and participant in the artworld was a source of intense search, discovery, and joy for him. It framed his life and filled it with meaning. What more can any artist ask?

I am also an abstract painter and inherited his interest in the lineage, development, and potential of abstraction as a mode of discourse. My own work and sensibility, though, has always had a softer focus. As a painter I’ve been more interested in atmosphere than edge. Ward never quite approved of what he considered my romantic tendencies and frequently accused me of being “too Turneresque”. He was a tough critic with a tightly-focused perspective, still, as Pollock said, having a strong point of view to push against is tonic for an artist. Gradually though, Ward accepted the seriousness of my own work as a painter, and later sponsored me for membership in the AAA. I think in the back of his mind he was always hoping to protect his legacy in the group, and sure enough, he put me right to work as his typist for the minutes. Deciphering his handwritten notes was always an interesting perceptual challenge.

 

Julian Jackson
Cloudlight, 2006
Oil on panel, 36 x 32 inches

MD: And finally, let’s talk for a moment about the exhibition of Ward’s work you are currently organizing.  You are mounting the first retrospective of Ward’s work at your gallery — Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, NY — which you founded in 2001 with your wife, artist Rene Lynch.  This must be a labor of love for you.  How are you approaching his exhibition and what would you like the audience to walk away with?

 

JJ: Running Metaphor is itself a labor of love, but this show is special for me. I’m seeing it as the culmination of my long and fascinating relationship with Ward. We’ll be exhibiting a small group of key pieces from each decade of his active working life from the late 40s until he stopped working due to health problems in 2003. Southerners like Ward and myself are made keenly aware of heritage and ancestry and, with this exhibition, I’m paying homage both to my uncle and to a member of the family of artists. I’m very pleased to be able to present a small selection of his life’s work, to frame a sense of the scope of that life, to honor it, and to bring it back into the light. Obviously, I’m very close to the subject of this show, which makes it impossible to be as objective and critical about the work as I might normally be when presenting an exhibition, but I do think the work speaks for itself. I’ll be very interested to learn how a contemporary audience sees and responds to his work.

Those of us involved in the artworld and artmaking to whatever degree are always most alert to the smoke of today’s fire, burning in the moment. Retrospectives are a chance to step out of time and take a longer view. Artists are made up of many things and context is one of them. Each artists’ contribution helps define and frame his or her moment. With hindsight we can see who was in the middle of the frame and who was out at the edges, but in a very real sense, the edges themselves play a constant and critical role in the definition of the center. I would like the audience to walk away from this show with a heightened appreciation of the flow of time that we’re all a part of, a renewed appreciation of the interesting contributions of my uncle, Ward Jackson, and a greater appreciation of the many fires that burn with heat at the edges.

 

Julian Jackson is a Brooklyn-based artist and co-founder of Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY.

Matthew Deleget is a Brooklyn-based artist and co-founder of MINUS SPACE.

Links
> American Abstract Artists
> Hans Hofmann Estate
> Judith Rothschild Foundation

 

Robert Yasuda, Coco-Palm (2006)

Robert Yasuda’s work stands well in a corner. His current exhibition includes three narrow corner paintings (“Half Full,” “Simple Truth,” and “Bonjour”) that work like studs or posts, rising vertically with a strenuous elegance, adding a sense of rigor to his otherwise atmospheric abstractions. Yasuda has favored the corner for some time, and his work, even in group shows, always seems to shine from that unlikely spot. Formally, they recall Barnett Newman’s fieldless and tightly packed “zips,” such as “The Wild” from 1950, but the thrust of the work is entirely different. A more recent connection could be drawn to the corner light sculptures of Dan Flavin, since Yasuda’s paintings, which are iridescent, cast a reflected glow of colored light onto the surrounding walls.

The artist’s paintings of the past five years are defined by their radical luminosity and eccentrically shaped supports. The fourteen paintings included here continue along that line, but the color is much more radiant, reflective, and silvery than before. Yasuda uses interference paints that shift in color depending upon the positions of the viewer and source of light. The plank-like length of the corner piece,“Artesian,” shifts in temperature from warm to cool depending upon where you stand—a simple tilt of the head can cause a sharp color change.

Not only do Yasuda’s paintings physically interact with the viewer, but, like true chameleons, they’re capable of multiple color states. Most of the new paintings have an extreme pearlescence that’s reminiscent of the polished surface on the interior of an abalone shell. At times pink is dominant, which gives way to periwinkle, and so on. Only “Pluto,” with its denser color, and “Elusive Metaphor,” with its effaced gesture, both from 2005, seem like holdovers from the artist’s previous series. Although technically impossible, it almost seems as if Yasuda is attempting to extend his color into the invisible poles of infrared and ultraviolet. In any case, his extreme antipodal push has yielded some intense and uncommon color combinations—the rare iridescence of butterflies and exotic fish comes to mind. Other minimal painters like David Novros, David Simpson, and more recently, John Millei, have worked with iridescent and/or interference paints but none has ever approached this specialized medium with quite the same airy delicacy.

Yasuda works on wooden panels that he has shaped by hand. The shapes are subtle, a slight cleft here, a softly rounded contour there. It’s worth noting that Yasuda, who was born in Hawaii, has some experience shaping surfboards. One can imagine him approaching a panel in the same manner he once approached a surfboard blank, with an eye towards shaping an edge to discretely personalize the wood. The artist also adds a layer of nearly sheer fabric that softens the panel’s surface and suspends the color/paint to such an atmospheric effect. Yasuda’s considerable hands-on craftsmanship is essential to his works’ poetic aura. Their manufacture makes them special from the start.

Yasuda’s painting is forceful, but gentle; confrontational, but oddly non-threatening. It strikes me as very non-New York (perhaps non-Western too) in that regard, where every personal encounter is typically marked by a kind of casual abrasiveness. Yasuda’s paintings seem to dwell on the ephemeral aspects of nature—deeply and profoundly, but not heroically. A painting such as “Beach Day” offers all the aqueous escape of the mistiest Olitski but without the weighty ego brio. In that sense, Yasuda’s painting comes as a welcome and necessary relief. He offers us an immediate and cultivated experience of nature, elemental meditations on water, light, and air (Monet minus the weeds). And in terms of available nature, they are far less mannered than, say, the city parks of Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, but just as critical as a necessary relief from the relentless onslaughts of urban life. A Yasuda painting welcomes the viewer into an endlessly shifting space of total opalescence—something akin to customized twilight.

 

Michael Brennan is a New York painter who writes on art.

introduction
Tilman has stated that his art has completely moved into the three-dimensional realm, and that his use of and response to architecture requires finding a balance between various environments and the objects that he makes and situates in these environments.  Inspired by everyday objects and structures, his goal is to present and represent light using color and form, which is mediated through the objects he makes, the structures in which the objects are located, and the overall integrated installation.  As René Kockelkorn writes about Tilman’s exhibition F218B-BXL, at CCNOA, Brussels in 2004, “in short, this is not merely an art to look at, but a physical and psychical space of experience.”

In the following interview the reader will find the word location used several times, and there are two instances where this word is extended to locational and locationality.  In reference to a pink shape he saw on the side of a building in New York which later influenced an art work of his, Tilman says, “somehow it caught my eye and I was fascinated by its awkward shape and color, and also its locational relationship.”  It wasn’t merely the pink shape that mattered, but also the place where it was situated and what surrounded it.  And in our discussion about site-specific and installation art, he says, “a work which is truly site-specific for me is a work which is locationally immanent, if one can say this, rather than a work which can be transported to any other location.” 

In particular, I am very fond of his use of the word “immanent” here, meaning indwelling; inherent; or all-pervading, which perhaps even carries a sense of transcendence.  “Locationally immanent” would mean that something is where it is meant to be, and that it can’t be anywhere else.  Much of what Tilman attempts in his recent work is the use objects and color to create situations that feel natural and original, yet are structured and heightened places in which the viewer experiences form and light; one might call these immanent locations.

—Chris Ashley, June 2006

 

The following conversation between Tilman and Chris Ashley was conducted via email in English between April and May 2006.  For further information about Chris Ashley, please visit www.chrisashley.net.

 

Chris Ashley: Your work F218B-BXL installed at CCNOA, Brussels in 2003 incorporated video and sound by Johan Vandermaelen.  What was your thinking about including environmental sound in your installation?  Is this the first time that you’ve included other media in an installation of yours, and is it something you intend to do again?

 

Tilman: F 218 B-BXL was the first site-specific installation; its basic aim was to create a dialogue between certain elements in my work, but also of perception itself.  I found it interesting to include also various media into my process to add another layer of possible perceptive momentum.  Sound, for example, became by bits an architectural structure and yet another element in these rooms on the same level as maybe a flat wall work.  It definitely is not meant as an atmospheric addition.

 

CA: During 2006 you have three solo exhibitions scheduled in Oslo, Dusseldorf, and Sydney.  Can you tell me about the work you will be showing in these different locations, how the work is different or the same, and if these different cities affect either the work you are showing or the installation?

 

T: Oslo is a rather involved project.  The show will contain seven stacked and layered wall objects, two floor objects and one large floor/wall object.  All works are made for the space, some beforehand in my Brussels studio, and the large objects here in Oslo, on-site.  The other gallery space will be occupied by a large installation similar to F 218 B-BXL.  This installation will also contain different media, like video and a sound piece by Belgian composer Aernoudt Jacobs, who composed this piece especially for this space and installation.

The show in Dusseldorf will be hosted by a rather small gallery, Konsortium, and in this venue I will show drawings and one wall object deriving from those drawings.  The series of drawings is called Fundstueck/gridworks, and is based on an object my eyes caught in New York two years ago—a mimetic relation, maybe.

The SNO (Sydney Non Objective) show later this year will most probably be a site-specific installation, due to the location and also due to the practicality—Sydney is a bit far away.  But no specific plans are made yet for this show.

In general I could say that a special location does not influence my work in particular, except that by traveling far distances to have exhibitions I got into working site-specifically and also more experimental lydue to this situation, a flexibility which I had to get acquainted with first, but now I feel very confident with this process of art-making; the post-studio thing, to maybe call it, helped me in some ways in the creative act and broadened my ways of approaching and dealing with the process of making a work of art.

 

CA: What was it that caught your eye in New York on which you based these drawings?  Do you often get ideas like this from your environment?  Is much of your work based on other objects or something in the environment?

 

T: That specific image I detected in New York was actually a huge pink shape consisting of isolation panels mounted on the outside brick wall of a building under construction, and somehow it caught my eye and I was fascinated by its awkward shape and color, and also its locational relationship.  But it is not that I am specifically looking for images like this—they just occur, and if they are strong enough, they find their way slowly into the process.  So I am trying to say that especially the architectural objects are not entirely dependent on this process of seeing.  This also can happen by working on drawings and making sort of loose sketches, especially when it comes to larger artworks.  But yes, I cannot deny a relationship to daily life objects, or at least the impulse I get from looking at things, objects, and my environment.

 

CA: Let’s talk about this idea of the “post-studio” practice, a not uncommon practice for many artists now.  I see a breakdown of art that is made in the studio, or made outside the studio, or is half-and-half.  There are artists who don’t have a studio beyond, say, a laptop, and who work with teams or fabricators.  Can you say more about this, and how it broadens your practice?  You’re still working in a studio, too, so are these approaches ever really separate, or is it more porous, something shifting back and forth?

 

T: “The world becomes the studio”—this is a line used by a New Zealand-based art critic, and I can definitely relate to this quote.  So in my case, this became an issue after being invited to places like Australia, or in cases of working with art-spaces that run on a low budget.  The works I execute then are usually made site-specific, or I find a place where I can continue the regular studio practice, so in this case I can set up a temporary studio wherever I want.  Maybe the idea of working in one place—the studio—is a very romantic idea in these times and days, and then may be one day it becomes important again.  The intimacy of the studio is still important, so to say, but also the flexibility of location, time and space are a big part of my working process, without interfering with the essential idea of my work.

 

CA: The literature about your work and your own statements emphasize your interest in color and light.  Your realization that light and color were your main concerns came over time, and through painting, and in some ways you are still involved in painting, but also sculpture.  I’m curious to know about why and how you make solid colored objects in order to get at the effects of light.  What result are you after in setting up for the viewer a situation where light is made with objects?

 

T: I guess my early interests in light stem from my concern for photography, which developed very young, also always painting at the same time.  Working with photography ended basically in doing very experimental photos about movement of light.  Photography seemed not the right tool for me then, and I turned to painting to explore light and its essential visual quality.  Sure, for a long time I literally painted and tried to paint/catch light, and through years of working and researching in different modes and styles (bad word, I know), I arrived very slowly at a much-reduced form to give light its platform.  So in this term, I understand my works of art as more carriers for existing light, and they can be flat, three dimensional art arranged in an installation.  A strong point in this mode of working is to invite the viewer to participate in this physical experience, to look and understand the subtleties of light and the objects and, in general, I think this can also spur more philosophical or even psychological points of understanding than the work of art might offer at first sight.

 

CA: What do you see as the philosophical and psychological aspects of experiencing and understanding your work?  Perception of light and color are primary experiences in your work, and these take place through certain forms.  These forms are hung or installed in specific ways, and may be integral to an architectural setting, perhaps bearing the influence of architecture.  We are all familiar with and can deeply experience architectural spaces—we move through them, live in them, work in them.  Our experience of space, and much of our lives, is shaped by architecture, and color and light.  In “The Poetics of Space,” Gaston Bachelard applies the method of Phenomenology to examine our experience of architecture, looking closely at various kinds of shapes and spaces.  Some of our experience is less conscious, even automatic, but at some point we become more aware of our interactions with various kinds of spaces.  Our reactions are at first physical, gradually turning to awareness and meaning—which might be a psychological recognition—and then as we process this it becomes an idea or an ideal, entering the realm of philosophy.  Our looking translates into an intellectual process and vice-versa, and it can be a very interesting process.  How does your art act in the continuum from the physical, to the psychological, to the philosophical?

 

T: I find your reference to Bachelard`s book very interesting.  Once I bought this book, about a half a year ago, but didn’t yet find time to focus on it.  The short rundown on Bachelard`s thoughts and ideas definitely reflects some subjects I am dealing with in my work, although I am missing subjects like personal physicality, sensuality and above all the factors of time, but, well, I haven’t read it yet.  Also, he is maybe more referring to the architectural space compared to the architectural/intimate space of a work of art.  For me, those questions evolved over a period of time, and the observations I made regarding the viewer’s act of seeing.  Once my works developed into three-dimensional objects I observed that most of the viewers still perceived those works as two-dimensional works, which deeply irritated me and raised a lot of questions about perception.  I then introduced those rather small boxes, called Volumina, and besides their own autonomy as works of art they also helped to seduce the viewer into another act of seeing and perception.  The viewer all of a sudden understood the three-dimensionality of the other works—looking behind, creating a curiosity—and once being three-dimensional those works created also a physicality within the viewer, which led to questions of psychology and, last but not least, philosophy.  There is sure more to say towards that subject, but maybe you get an idea of what I am aiming for.

 

CA: There are other artists with a strong psychological and philosophical foundation, who also deal with light and color.  How do you see your work in terms of the history of other artists for whom pure color and light are central, for example Robert Irwin, Dan Flavin, or James Turrell?

 

T: Well, I think history is long and there are many artists I am interested in from Renaissance to today, and I think this is a quite complex question.  The three names you mention are sort of tied into Minimalism, and sure I respect their work in their own form of dealing with the phenomena of light, but I do not understand myself as a Minimalist.  There are certainly thoughts which I am very interested in, and also a certain aesthetic, but I wouldn’t nail down my approach to them.  A very strong influence was a rather unknown artist who died recently, Robert Fosdick, and maybe also Belgian artist Marthe Wéry, who also died last year.  I can definitely say that there is a tradition in my language of art starting more precisely maybe with De Stijl and Bauhaus, for example.

 

CA: Can you say a little more about Fosdick and Wéry, their work, and their influence?

 

T: As for my friend Robert Fosdick, I have to say that it wasn’t necessarily the actuality of his individual works, it was the ideas he gave me about, let’s say, possibilities for understanding the subtleties of light.  Deeply embedded in the dialogue between the realistic, scientific understanding of the natural phenomena of light itself, and on the other side a philosophical, spiritual approach towards it, the conversations with him supported my own development and triggered a manifold of questions in me.

As for Marthe Wéry, I guess we met just like that, a deep understanding in what we were both after in terms of physicality and intellect, the relationship between an art object and its function in architectural space, the importance of light as a mending plate between those entities, an almost sensoround experience, the questions of one’s own physicality, one’s own physical position—where do we stand?

 

CA: Going back to Minimalism, in his well-known essay “Art and Objecthood,” first published in “Artforum” in June 1967, Michael Fried used the word “theatricality” to describe, and criticize, Minimalism’s phenomenon of an object or form in real space experienced in real time.  This attribute eventually came to have many positive connotations.  When I mentioned Irwin, Flavin, and Turrell, I wasn’t really thinking of your work as Minimalism; I asked about them because light and perception are central to your work.  But now, given your use of installation, I’m wondering whether or not you incorporate this “theatrical” aspect of installation into your work.

 

T: I think the term “theatrical” in this respect is theatrical in itself, and also maybe the term “installation” is wrong to describe those spaces I create.  They are clearly site-specific in their nature, which I think installation art is not.  The spaces I create are clearly connected to its location.  They never can be set up again in the same manner once they are standing in an important dialogue with its architectural environment and the existing light conditions.  I do not understand the architectural environment as a setting or stage in that sense.

 

CA: How is it possible that an installation is not site-specific?  I wonder if what you mean is that installation art doesn’t have to be site-specific.  It is dependent on the location, which can change each time the work is installed, in different conditions.  Regarding your work, do you mean that the architectural environment in which you install your work is not a backdrop or a platform, but is integrated into something larger— the entire work would include your objects or interventions, plus the environment?

 

T: Sure, all installations are in some way site-specific; I just wanted to draw a line there between installation and site-specific, which you actually answered with the second part of your question regarding this subject.  A work which is truly site-specific for me is a work which is locationally immanent, if one can say this, rather than a work which can be transported to any other location and re-installed in a maybe slightly different configuration within any given space.

 

CA: Much of your work certainly shares the essential characteristics of de Stijl: pure abstraction; a reduction to essential form and color; an emphasis on vertical and horizontal, and individual, discrete works.  The Bauhaus’ key characteristics are architecture and function, and the philosophy that the practice of art is situated in a greater totality.  How do you see your work in relation to this?

 

T: I guess there is definitely a relation to those thoughts.  Josef Alber’s quote that “art shall open eyes” is also very important in the bigger picture to make art accessible.  And I truly believe that the idea of reduction and the search for the subtleties in reductive art can open doors for understanding the bigger picture in a visual, physical, intellectual way.  This art is not aiming to be self-contained; it wants to relate, to give, to breathe.

 

CA: Do you arrive at the format and sizes of your work intuitively, or are proportion and numbers important drivers for your work?

 

T: My process of working is usually a very loose one, very intuitive.  I seldom work on proper sketches although, sure, when it comes to large-scale works I have to sort of plan them out.

But there’s no math or any relation to math involved.  I could say more that there is a definite relationship to architecture and building and creating spaces.  The objects actually could be described as micro-architectures, and I also believe there’s a sort of architecture, or maybe better structure, in the chaotic, incidental appearance of things which constantly find their way into our eyes.

 

CA: The idea of micro- and incidental architecture is interesting.  For example, a work like 4103, which is a small box open on the top and bottom hung high on a wall near the ceiling could be initially taken for a sign, or a fire alarm, or some kind of sensor or detector.  What look like large colored sheets of fiberboard in E472C-BSL lean against the wall or are propped up off the floor on small planks, like sections of wall waiting to be installed.  The stacked pieces in F218B-BXL are placed like construction materials that have just been delivered to a site, ready to be used.  Elements : Squares are like colorful aluminum window frames on display at a home design convention.  Besides the forms you use, I think I see in your use of color a connection to very contemporary, popular architecture.

 

T: I think there is definitely a connection in my works to architectural space in general, as a physical space in relation to one’s own physicality and its relation to it: what do we see, where are we standing, what is going on?  There are those kinds of thing around us, those relationships, to discover and see.  Things that look awry are the concerns of this work.  As for the use of color, I don’t really know whether there is a direct connection to architecture.  In architecture, yes, color gets used in many different aspects—as form, as decoration, etc.  In my work color functions under a very different umbrella—it is light.

 

CA: The color is material, first.  It could be the natural color of the material, or painted, or printed, or the color is applied in some way.  It’s a property of the object.  Of course, color is made possible by light, but how does the color move from being a physical thing to being simply light?

 

T: In early Greek philosophy, light is described as the fourth element, the ether; they called it Olkas, a carrier which holds all together.  That’s what I am trying to say with simply light, making a reference to this thought.  So color, yes, as a material it becomes a carrier of thought, something essential, so to say.

 

CA: After all of these exhibitions, what next?

 

T: Well, first of all I need a break, but in general I might say that I haven’t played out all the possibilities which my work process offers.  After all, it is slow, art, and I cannot just produce, period.  So I guess I will keep on researching my own possibilities.