Click to read complete panel discussion

PowerHouse Presents… Resource: Where Abstract Art is (From) -– a virtual panel moderated by Rossana Martinez, founder and curator of Minus Space, and organized by the curators of Source–Susan Ross and Melissa Staiger. Source completed its run at The Halls at Bowling Green on May 28th. The show presented a mix of seven artists: Glen Cunningham, Mark Dagley, Laura Fayer, Molly Herman, Lori Kirkbride, Ben LaRocco and Rachael Wren. While each has a practice that fits neatly under the umbrella of “abstraction”, the breadth of their styles and influences ultimately explodes any attempt at easy categorization.

Rossana Martinez: Allan Kaprow said, “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.” Guide us through a day when you find inspiration and time to create.

Molly Herman: Ideally, a painting day for me will begin by practicing yoga to get focused. Then, on my walk to the studio, I may notice the morning light on a bright bodega awning, or maybe a neon sign glancing off brick walls or lighting the water, etc. In Brooklyn, I’m always aware of the landscape’s broken grid — the incidental architecture shaped by time, human hands and nature.

In my studio, I think about building a painting. I conceive a painting while painting. I turn the canvas and often work on the floor. I stain, brush, stipple, scrub and trowel the paint. The paint stroke is a visual and rhythmic measurement (of the hand and body) with a logic that the painting is built upon, layer by layer. Color creates space and rhythm. some colors are deeply stained into the canvas, but appear to pop forward because of their saturation, other colors are painted in thick impasto and come forward as texture. In a way my painting process is like moving to remember or to conjure an impression of a glimpsed moment.

Laura Fayer: I have a live/work space so the line between my art and my life is truly fluid and indistinct. I live with my art. I might be passing through the studio into another room when I think of a mark that should be made, or glimpse a patterned piece of paper that I suddenly realize should be collaged onto something else. I allow those realizations to happen in a fluid way and act on them even if my original intent in crossing through the room was not to work on a painting.

Ben LaRocco: Well, I think Kaprow is right. My studio is next to my kitchen and sometimes I eat tuna sandwiches while I paint…

Brent: While artist-in-residence in the most western point of Ireland, Achill Island, you tapped in a description of the landscape: Dramatic, With Cliffs, An Ocean, And Totally Isolated.

This is your work: my first impression.

There is Nature in your pieces. And it took a tough wind and a heavy sea to set this all in motion.

I see firm – more than firm, hard. Hard material that has cuts, often just a few. The cuts themselves appear powerful. They can cut into a shape. Another piece they cut to form the shape. And if anyone were to ask me about the lightness of your work, I would reply ‘Weight!’

Cecilia: I am glad you brought up the residency in Ireland. The Achill Heinrich Boll Foundation operates the residency and it is a great opportunity to explore this particularly isolated peninsula.

As noted, Achill represents the most western point of Ireland. It signifies the ‘extreme edge’ of the land. You cannot physically go further.

I would walk over the high cliffs and see the ocean there below, and could do so without distractions: There were only the sea and the waves, the wind and the lines.

In 2008 I visited Canna, a similar island. Canna is part of The Hebrides, located off of the western coast of Scotland. Only 15 people live there. And it is filled with nothing: There are no roads – traffic, shops, or computer. The only payphone you could find was in the little white cottage from which you could view the sea from every window. These are the places that impress me most. They allow a focus on the rhythm of the landscape. And this gives me time to find the repetition. The tougher the wind, the higher the wave, the more I like it.

In front of a work you are likely to focus on color, line and form. Maybe there is a sense of weight. I want to transfer this sense to the viewer. It’s kind of an abstract value until you actually lift the work.

The sculptures are flat and executed in thick (8-15mm) plates of metal. While they appear light (like graphic signs or forms), they are actually very heavy. The challenging features of the material are the power and strength of the metal. This is what I like to work with.

I use the saw-cuts to interfere/delineate the square form or circle. The placing/location of the cut is crucial and is a very clear and radical decision: once performed in steel it is irreversible. If it is 1 or 2mm to the left or right the whole work can change, shift. The balance and composition has to be just right. I admire the work of Ad Dekkers (NL) and Gordon Matta Clark (US), construction and de-construction are important features of both their work, however they interpret it…

Installation view at MINUS SPACE project space, 2009

Matthew Deleget: Where did the paintings in your exhibition at MINUS SPACE begin?

Douglas Melini: Well, you were actually involved in the dawn of the new work. As you know during the summer of 2007, I had just finished preparing work for your exhibition Machine Learning and as fate would have it, my studio flooded, destroying close to a year’s worth of paintings, most of which were set for your exhibition. For me it was a pretty traumatic event. You know, it’s one of those things that can result in a number of outcomes. One can retreat and become very angry or negative, maybe even bitter over something like this, or one can engage with it and make sense of the situation, create meaning out of it. And for me, my studio practice is way too valuable to let this type of event take me in any direction other than forward.

For years I’ve been interested in folk arts and crafts, and it’s played a significant role in my painting practice in some form or another for the last 12 years. When I began to think about making new paintings after the flood, I began to consider the idea of a talisman and how it might function in relationship to painting. At the time I wasn’t quite sure how it would function, but I knew that I was headed in that direction. Shortly after I finished the earliest versions of the paintings, I visited a friend down in North Carolina in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I saw many barns in the countryside dotted with large geometric images and they actually looked close to the images that I was painting. Neither of us was sure exactly what these images on the barns represented, but I remembered the hex signs that the Pennsylvania Dutch had used as protective symbols for they’re barns and figured that they were being used in a similar way.

My studio practice has always been about letting personal events and experiences filter into my work in one way or another and I liked the idea of an abstract painting having talismanic powers. I know that the idea of a painting as a talisman may seem like a leap of faith or something, but making paintings requires a belief in something that’s not necessarily tangible. One has to have faith in the practice, a kind of focus or trust in the act of painting, hoping that it will all eventually lead somewhere. To be truthful things were happening in a very organic way and I was just trying to pay attention to everything. It all seemed to make sense to me. I guess that’s how the paintings for MINUS SPACE began.

Untitled (Abstract Painting No. 14), 2009
Acrylic on canvas with hand-painted frame
23 x 19 inches

Matthew: The new bilaterally symmetrical forms in your paintings elicit a fierce kaleidoscopic effect, a kind of folding, centrifugal space. Your paintings also feature a brand new element in your work — elaborate, hand-painted frames. All of the frames are restricted to two colors, and present diamond patterns on the front face of the painting and fine stripes on the sides. Tell me about them.

Douglas: Yeah, I wanted to create a space that was constantly moving back and forth, a space that was folding and unfolding, but I wanted it to also exist as an overall image. I thought about how a kaleidoscope works, breaking up and fracturing a space and I really wanted that sort of dynamic in the paintings. With the frames, the initial idea for them began organically as a result of the paintings damaged in the flood. Although the damage was throughout, the majority of it was on the sides. I had used this black gaffers tape to keep the sides clean, and apparently the tape has an ink in it which makes it black, and when the water hit it, it bled all over the sides. This damage made me think a lot about the sides of the painting, I guess you could say that a seed was planted, and because of this, I started to think of frames and what it means for a painting to be framed.

So, when I began to think and plan the new works, I imagined them with frames from the start. I knew I wanted the new paintings to function more like interiors and the frames really allowed me to achieve this, creating a border, a kind of viewfinder type of space, keeping the information on the inside. And you know, I really like the turtle. It’s a very interesting creature. The shell is obviously a protective layer, but it’s such a distinct part of their overall appearance. What would a turtle look like without its shell? Anyway, when I set out to paint the frames, I wanted a pattern that would repeat around it. I used a diagonal to divide the spaces, creating a triangular motif for the outside that I could use as an opposition to the information on the inside. And the bands on the sides are very important because they activate the sides, so that when you move around the object it remains visually active from all vantage points.

Detail of Untitled (Abstract Painting No. 13), 2009
Acrylic on canvas with hand-painted frame
23 x 19 inches

Matthew: I find it really compelling how you took what was in every sense a terrible, even tragic, incident involving your new work — works you never even had the opportunity to show publicly — and used it as an opportunity to challenge yourself and push your future work even further. In addition to the framing, your use of color in these paintings is moving in a new direction too. The works now feature iridescent for the first time, which appear to sit on top of your other colors, including metallics, fluorescents, gray values, pinks, turquoise blues, etc. How are you using color in these new works?

Douglas: My overall approach to how I think about color and what I want it to do in my paintings has stayed the same. I’ve always been interested in color in relation to the social and issues of taste, but my approach has never been a scientific one. It’s always been very intuitive. I’m influenced by everything that I see in the world and I try to incorporate my experiences into my paintings. I often use color as a way to translate those experiences, always hoping to create a unique and unusual chromatic space.

In my earlier work, it was more of a balancing act with the color. With the newer paintings, the color is much more paired down and my process for arriving at the colors in any one painting has changed. I spend a lot of time thinking about the individual colors that I’m going to use way before the painting starts. It’s a real process and I try to remain very focused during this time, meditating on color. Once I get a good idea of where I want to go, I start to make swatches of the colors I want to use, adjusting them accordingly. Some are mixed, some are layered, and some colors are straight out of the tube. It’s usually a combination of all three.

The patterns function like vessels. They carry the color. Each component of the pattern is a color and the combination of these different colored lines is going to make an overall hue, creating specific vibrations. I have to consider this and be very selective in order to achieve the look or feel I’m after. Needless to say, changes are often made and I try to remain as open as possible while constructing the painting to allow for the necessary color adjustments. I’m going for an overall feel, but there is a lot of experimenting to get to that place. Although it’s mostly intuitive, there is some applied science involved when arriving at certain colors. The metallic and iridescent paints are new additions to the work. I want the surfaces to become more activated and I like the way the metallics create a certain kind of surface depth, while the iridescent paint allowed for a shifting in color as you moved from side to side of the work, which I love.

Installation view at MINUS SPACE project space, 2009

Matthew: I want to pick up on a couple of interesting ideas you just mentioned. You describe your approach as less about science and more about intuition. Similarly, in previous conversations with you at your studio, you also described your paintings and your use of pattern as subjective, specifically in comparison with earlier Op Art precedents, such as Bridget Riley and Richard Anuszkiewicz. You described their use of pattern to me as coming from a more scientific or mathematical point of departure. I think many viewers commonly associate pattern painting with a kind of fundamental objectivity. Talk a bit about how you arrived at using pattern in your work. And do you think of yourself as a pattern painter?

Douglas: Patterning is a natural process of the world. In many ways patterning is part of our everyday life. As an example, I wake up every morning and experience a type of patterning within my own body. You know those patterns you experience when you rub your eyes in the morning? They’re actually an entoptic phenomenon called a phosphene. It’s considered a natural self-induced hallucination, and it’s the perception of light without light actually entering the eye. Sometimes it’s caused by pressure applied to the closed eyes.

I’ve been involved with patterning in my work for a long time, but I never consciously set out to investigate it in any specific way. It was something that I was always drawn to within my painting, something that seemed to keep coming up in different forms. There is math involved with my work, but it’s also intuitive, no specific formulas or anything like that. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is what it is. I guess I’m more specific about picking certain elements and then using them continuously in the work to try create a space. I do have some rules in place, but I think most artists set up some basic rules that they work from. To be honest, I’m not so sure that the artists you mentioned would be completely objective, just like my work is not completely subjective. But, I think what I do would be closer to alchemy than science.

Douglas Melini and his brother, circa 1977

I’ve always been interested in the way patterning is used in quilting and I attempt to achieve that quality in my work. I also like the way that the pattern allows me to keep the color in my paintings organized. Like I mentioned earlier, they’re vessels. You know an interesting thing happened to me regarding the pattern I use in these newer paintings. When I began considering how I wanted these paintings to function, I knew I wanted to eliminate all of the other patterns I was using in the older paintings and focus on just one. The grid pattern I am using was immediately my choice because of its versatility, but this pattern somehow seemed significant in a peculiar way. Sometimes in the beginning, we don’t always know why we initially respond strongly to certain things. Well, several months after I had finished the first couple of paintings, my mom sent me this box of photos from when I was kid. As I’m going through the box, I see this photo of me and my brother in our bedroom, and I was blown away by the wall paper, because it’s almost the exact same pattern that I am using in these paintings. I mean I went to sleep and woke up to this image for the first thirteen years of my life, so it makes sense that it would have burned into my mind. It was definitely information that had been absorbed prior to me using it in my paintings, and truthfully I liked the fact that I had this personal connection to the image.

As far as whether I consider myself a pattern painter, no I never have, I like things to remain more open, and specific labels really prevent that. I’ll leave the whole boxing and categorizing thing to someone else.

Douglas Melini’s exhibition It Flows Over Us Without Meaning continues at MINUS SPACE project space through December 5, 2009.

Installation view at Non Objectif Sud, France, 2009

Brent: A drawing dated 1978, Untitled, chalk on paper, has a pair of identical penciled or conté grids which you use to make a series of what appear to be perfect arcs; there are finger marks or smudges; some arcs are taken out. The arcs appear to form some shape, allude to volume, but never really do. What I see is a point where you stopped. Was that because you felt the image had reached a stage whereby via the residue the movement just kept going on all by itself? I sense the building of form and then the letting go, engaging in a perfect slip, of folding in and out, in pairs, a synchronizing of different stages.

In Dark Nebula in Saggitarius, 1979, the marks have a similar feel in touch, and there appears to be some pairing, folding, and twisting. Though any geometric sub-structural hint is well hidden under what lay on top. I have an image of this as the remnants of a bout.

Linda: That was a smaller try of a group of large (approx 4×7′ or larger depending upon the space) drawings I made on the wall. The grid was ruled in with pencil and made a rectangular pattern. Each part of the symmetrical grid was drawn upon with chalk using simple rules: only quarter arcs, straight lines, changing the movement at a crossing, etc. They were freehand and each section done with each hand. That is to say, the right grid drawn on with the right hand and the left with left. I just started in the middle and drew out and then came back. I not quite erased what went before to push it into the background and then did it again, responding to the first drawing. I thought of it as re-seeing in time that could have gone on forever. I guess I stopped when I thought the movement was over. Kind of with a long exhale very much as you describe.

I went from the analytical gesture to some years of drawings in which I used the chalk and eraser to literally remake various spiral galaxies. I was looking at small photos in the Hubble Atlas of Galaxies. The epiphany was that these galaxies were the analog of the gestures in the earlier work, and of course by extension the body and brain alike were similarly organized natural phenomena. Drawing for me was a kind of research. Looking at those small pictures united my hand and mind as I tried to find the structure that was simultaneously building and destroying the form. This info was not commonly available as it is now and the few books that existed like Mandelbrot’s first and Pirogene’s were the only references I had to try to find out more of what I intuited to be true. In 1982 I did an exhibition of big drawings in Copenhagen. The show was titled The Order of Chaos and here is a picture of one of them done from the galaxy M101…

Karen Schifano: Fawn, you’ve often recommended books to me that are about re-thinking architecture, utopian explorations concerned with designing new kinds of spaces for living, for example, A Pattern Language, Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, and Superstudio. Can you begin by talking about what those books mean to you, and how they might help to fuel your own quest to find out, as you ask in an earlier statement, “How can we build more room into our personal landscape? How can we craft choice and consciousness into the spaces we occupy?” What do you think about being called “‘utopian”?

Fawn Krieger: Well, first, I think every living thing is essentially utopian. And I don’t think inanimate things can have visions or beliefs — that they can exist as utopian — but things can be imprinted with beliefs and visions, and can help to carry and transmit them. I think matter is sort of like a recessive gene, or a sparkplug.

I don’t see the books of mine you mention as designing new spaces for living. I see them as analyzing the psychological and cultural infrastructures of what we’ve collectively decided to call architecture. The consciousness of these particular books — each quite different — expands my sensitivity of what it means to build and inhabit space.

This question of mine you raise asks me now how it is we move from the occupation of space to inhabiting it — the difference of living at others’ expense to the choice of living WITH others, and with otherness.

HOVER (lake 5), 2005
Composite digital drawing; ink-jet print on sintra board
51 x 3 x 41 cm

KS: So is there a way of connecting these thoughts to your upcoming project in Portland? How did you come up with the idea for this piece?

FK: For my project at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, I will be making a US National Park that functions as a stageset. National Parks are one of many stages for the enacting of national identity. They are tourist destinations, which contradict their position of an untouched wilderness to one designed, however inconspicuously, for consumption. How do we make sense of the terrible injustices that are built into our American landscape? As an artist, and a sculptor specifically, I’m asking about our material history, and about how we inhabit and relate to the presence of physical truths — bodies (of land, of self, of community).

Study for National Park, 2009
Composite digital drawing on family photograph
(Athabasca Glacier, BC-Canada, 1984)

The idea for the piece was sort of woven from a number of inspirational threads. For 5 years I’ve been working indirectly with some photos I found of a cross country trip I took with my family in 1984. They reveal intense psychologies of a family structure embedded within vast American landscapes. When I got obsessed with Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) last summer, I began to think more and more about frozen moments where multiple bodies stand within immense plateaus and clearings whose scales are so profound that they kind of alienate while containing. I wanted to create a series of tableau vivants in national parks, with actors reenacting my family photographs. But then felt it compromised the very distortions of intimacy that involve immediate and physically profound scale shifts, since the audience for the work would always see it remotely, as a video document. So my challenge became one of bringing the national park to them.

Krieger with her father
Puerco Pueblo ruins
Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona
1984

Screenshot from L’avventura (1960)
Michelangelo Antonioni

KS: Wow, I’m amazed at the ambition of this project! Barnett Newman spoke of “the sublime” as a subject matter for the Abstract Expressionists, influenced in part by the vast scale of the American landscape. What’s interesting to me is how you want to undermine the sublime, and play with shifts of scale to reveal what’s underneath the network of mythologies we’ve created. It seems like another layer of awareness, an opening into a larger and more complex notion of our individual and group identities as Americans, at this particular time in our history. The slippery feeling of the word “utopia” connects into the notion we were all taught in school about our “Manifest Destiny”. Although utopia has a long history as a concept, it almost seems as if America reclaimed it and branded it as it’s own possession.

Anyway, I’m wondering how you’ll physically create those “immediate and profound scale shifts” in your set. And how the theatrical aspect of your work, the stage set, is different than “installation”. In both, I’d imagine, the audience becomes a kind of actor, and so moves and experiences a created sense of place and time.

FK: I am very much having a conversation with the history of painting, but I’m less interested in the sublime and more drawn to a conflicted, paradoxical kind of place, between the heroic and utter failure. The Hudson River School is where it’s at for me — both first and second generation, but especially first because it’s less aware of itself, represents a radical departure, and marks the beginning of what we now call American art history, but which of course, was made centuries upon centures after so much incredible art had already been produced on this land. All the morality and entitlement, the embedded psychologies of gender, class wealth, race; notions of “wild,” “tamed,” “civilized”…  I stand in front of the Oxbow at the Met a lot, and I am just amazed by the weight Cole asks us to carry. Those works were tourist commercials, real estate advertisements, and instructions for erasure and hypocrisy. But it also can’t be denied that they offered us a departure from Europe, from what was known, an entrance into the cinematic, the environmental, and the opportunity to define ourselves as artsts and audiences of a new era.

I think these inspirations are so big — gargantuan and impossibly awkward — which is why I like them. I don’t mean to enter into their bigness, but to squish the monumental into the scale of the body. So we could hold them, and pay attention to the sensations they surface through embodiment.

When I was in art school in the mid-90s and I’d hear about an artist who makes installations, I just didn’t feel any association. The word felt contrived to me, like something was applied to a space instead of transforming it. It wasn’t until after I got out of graduate school, ten years later, that I was introduced to stage-set-making as artwork. It came through a collaborative project called ROOM, with Wynne Greenwood. We made domestic spaces as stage-sets in which her band, Tracy + the Plastics, would perform. The introduction of the idea of the “set” created lots of new questions that just felt completely inspiring to me.

First, there were questions about audience and performer safety, which I loved immediately. Then there were questions about communication and collaboration through building, that I found reinforced the conceptual principals within my work. Then there were questions about spectatorship, witness, interaction, experience, participation, and movement. I started to choose the term “audience” over the art term “viewer”, and found that within the act of becoming audience are mini practices of citizenship. More and more, I am finding there is no distinction between performer and audience, so the spaces I build often dismantle conceptual and structural hierarchies that would otherwise support this. I don’t imagine anyone will have to “act” in National Park. They are already part of the construction without entering it.

ROOM, collaboration with Tracy + the Plastics (Wynne Greenwood)
The Kitchen, NYC, 2005
Installation view (detail)
Carpet, wood, foam, paint, fabric, paper, hardware, a/v equipment
Approx. 17 x 9 x 2.5 m
Photos © Paula Court, Courtesy of the Kitchen’s Archives

ROOM, collaboration with Tracy + the Plastics (Wynne Greenwood)
The Kitchen, NYC, 2005
Performance view (detail)
Carpet, wood, foam, paint, fabric, paper, hardware, a/v equipment
Approx. 17 x 9 x 2.5 m
Photos © Paula Court, Courtesy of the Kitchen’s Archives

KS: It seems like some of these same considerations (in terms of audience/performer and citizenship) play a big part in your previous project, COMPANY at Art in General in 2007-2008.

FK: Totally. Kristan Kennedy (the Visual Art Program Director at PICA) invited me to do a commission in Portland after learning of COMPANY — a shop as work-of-art that existed in Art in General’s storefront space for close to a year. I began COMPANY with many questions about the “stage” of consumption, about desire, longing, value, ownership, and the commerce of art. Also about inspiration — how and why and when we work directly through it and likewise, depart from it. But by the end of that piece, my questions had moved more into ideas about roles (sesame, poppyseed, whole wheat…); about moments when our subjecthood becomes objectified through our position as consumers, and when objects take on identities and assume power beyond their inanimate proportions, as a part of this same mechanism. I became interested in this transference between subject and object, and how it informs the different characters within socialized structures implicitly tied to consumption.

Because it was COMPANY that inspired Kristan to approach me, I first began my discussions with her in thinking about how we could take COMPANY to Portland. What would it mean to make a stage for American consumption that is nomadic? That’s when I began to look into the history of American tourism, all around the same time I was thinking about those people on the mountain in L’avventura, and my family’s cross country photos. My questions have as much to do with notions of domestic movement, as they do with concrete challenges, like shifting my process of making objects framed within a structure — as I did with COMPANY — into making a structure that functions as one humongous object.

COMPANY, 2007-8
Art in General, NYC

COMPANY: pastrami on rye (Line 2), 2008
Foam, canvas, spraypaint
21 x 21 x 9 cm

KS: You seem so clear and articulate about the kinds of questions you ask yourself. Are there ever times when you’re surprised or thrown off and things derail, the process is murky and words fail you? Any stories to tell here?

FK: Always. Most of the time I feel overwhelmed with what I don’t know, and fear and doubt I have the strength to enter straight into it — that is my work…at least, that is what my work is for me. I feel my job as an artist is half to undo, to unlearn, to unknow, and the other half is to be accountable for it. I’m not sure what I’d do without the murk, but the painful part isn’t so much the murk but choosing the murk over its alternative. Again and again. That’s really where the blow is.

Words always fail. That’s part of what makes them beautiful, part of what makes them as brittle, malleable, and curious to me as cement, or the yellow craft foam Jo-Ann Fabrics insists on not selling anymore in its NYC locations for some unexplainable reason. This is another plea, Jo-Ann!

When I was in my last year of graduate school at Bard College, in 2004, I felt a need to build out instead of up, and to suspend weight and density atop vacant spaces. I was thinking a lot about the history of American architectures, and questioning what it meant to build as a white American woman — what my hand in the construction of this country meant, what I was building on top of, and what I was building to support. It was at this time that I first rediscovered those childhood cross country photos. Prior to that body of work, I had been making some terrible and some not-so-terrible sculptures with cut logs, and images of founding fathers, as well as drawings of cut slabs of meat.

When these architectures began to surface, I couldn’t see their connection to my previous work, and they all looked like failures, literally crumbling in front of me. Then I realized, fortunately right before my thesis board(!), that the work was really a set of inadequate domestic foundations, expressing both potential and obliteration, and linking itself directly to the word “founding”. The connection helped me to make a larger link between sacrifice and violence, between expectation and failure, between establishment and transgression, and between consumption and regeneration. I realized, not just that these were foundations, but that I had found my voice, and titled the work FOUND.

The arrival of words to my voice, is the remnant of fighting for my own truths, all of which must be translated into language, whether it’s material, verbal, or written.

Bricks (from FOUND series), 2004
Bricks, concrete, wood
183 x 15 x 61 cm

KS: So let’s go from the verbal to making things and materials. I’ve heard that you once characterized your aesthetic as “Flinstone-ian”. I’m drawn to the accessible, hand-made, funky quality of your work, as it carries this seriously intellectual weight. Quite a tension there.

FK: It’s a strange sensation when someone asks you to define your aesthetic. For me, any response to that question will include transgression, and in this case, I was playing with the idea of ‘a canon’ of sculpture, sort of thinking about stone carving and pedestals, in relation to a canon of stone-age-ness.

Constantin Brancusi
Le Baiser / The Kiss, 1908
Plaster, 58cm high
Philadelphia Museum of Art / © Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Fred’s Monkeyshines
The Flintstones
October 17, 1963 (Season 4, Episode 5)

KS: Yeah, I can see that it’s strange to look at something you’ve done after the fact and try and describe it. I know that it’s the result of your process, and yet I’m still interested in how and why your sculpture looks the way it does, why you make the choices you make. Are you also thinking through your materials? Or do you choose materials and structures after you’ve researched and thought about a project? Or both? Maybe you could lead us through “how you use your hands”.

FK: I often work in series, or chapters. This is not something I try to do, it’s just the way I work. So what happens is that there’s a whole infrastructure of ideas and feelings happening at once…an obsession with The Love Boat, orange juice, furniture mail-order catalogues from the late 60s, my father’s hard leather jacket with patchwork leather buttons, oak veneer, Holly Hobby, and having a bad cold…let’s say. These incongruous associations combine with physical, visceral urges and emotional memories that are often associated with touch and necessity, like feeling a carpet edge at home, or poking my 3-year-old-finger in cellophane packages of ground beef. They are not thoughts; they are completely of the body.

My job is to get out of my own way at this point — to trust what I lean into completely, and to trust the interconnectedness of these pulls, all without question. My aesthetic, I suppose, is really a measure of moment. During this time it’s less that I intend to keep my process private than that I haven’t even identified it as process. It’s simply living. And what happens when a system of attractions begins to weave together, is that I sort of adapt an auto-psychoanalytic approach, to make sense — or meaningfulness — of those symbols that I feel sympathetic to. At this point, my job is to take ownership of my choices, by asking every conceivable question of their properties and interrelationships. I guess the relationship between my thinking and my hands is one of roles really, of becoming. It’s as though my role shifts from child to parent, in a way.

Photo © Abe & Sofie McNally

KS: And are the materials that you work with, things that sometimes look like craft supplies or stuff from your kitchen, chosen partly as a response to those “physical, visceral urges and emotional memories”? There’s a direct, almost child-like presence to these materials and the way you put things together.

FK: The materials are another obsession happening simultaneously to the orange juice and Love Boat. They aren’t a response to necessities — they are part of them. Felt and concrete are both materials that have come up a lot in this way for me. As are leather, dyed canvas (with frayed/inside out edges), and silver mylar. It feels kind of like a craving. Like a thing that, when consumed, makes you feel whole or complete, or fully satiated. For a moment…

National Park will be on view at Washington High School in Portland, Oregon, from September 3 – October 18, 2009, as part of the Portland Institue for Contemporary Art’s Time Based Arts Festival.  A recently published catalogue on Krieger’s project COMPANY can be purchased here.

Karen Schifano is a New York City-based painter

All photos © Fawn Krieger, unless otherwise noted.

A documentary film directed by Michael Feldman and shot by Antonio Cisneros for Thornton Willis’ recent opening of The Lattice Paintings.

Brent: You have a penchant for travel, often for the more exotic places on this globe. You return home, go to the studio, and take out your notes… what are these notes?

Mel: I like to be completely immersed while I’m traveling—so this means not putting a frame/ lens/ color on paper between the experience and myself. Sometimes I take little snapshots with my phone, or quickly record video of small moments with my cheap camera. On this trip to Senegal I have three little videos I am happy with: one is walking on the road in a village by the welder’s stand. The welder likes to listen to Islamic music and blasts it on an old speaker (music and tools powered by a generator). So we are approaching this stand, walking behind our grandmother and a taxi is approaching from behind, sounding a sort of funny custom horn. It’s these strange moments, when layers of unrelated things that occur spontaneously, that characterize travel for me. I have no idea what will happen with these captured moments once I return…

“Brent: Pop, peek-a-boo, poking around, of color that is not of this world, though worldly set in architectural places that can eat up the logic of their interior. Indeed you have for lunch many of the preconceptions of the formal. Your sense of order of space and how you color it physical is full of humor often playing up to our own inquisitiveness, how we are likely to navigate – how we and our body often lurch into understanding looking for an easy registration, and what happens when this is not possible.

Henriette: Well, I have been poking around for a while hoping to make people aware of color and shape, and of non-existing space. In Joint I transformed a little area into something new and unexpected, joking around with color and shape while not knowing where it would lead – just having fun, and working through ways that would perhaps mislead the audience. I always trust myself to find the next step in the direction I am going, but this is also scary, I can tell you. But usually the work I’ve just completed hints to what is going to happen next, even if I’m not totally aware of it.

I like the idea of making something that nobody has seen before. Although I am aware that everything has been done already, it doesn’t matter. I am also aware that I’m working in a tradition, but that doesn’t matter either. Actually I think it’s a strength knowing that I am working in a tradition. There is a chance to break all the unspoken rules. And then you find out that what you have to do is invent new ones, your own rules, otherwise the work doesn’t work. And this is odd, and interesting, and matters…”

Brent Hallard: Out of location, a thing found – wonders in ways that form a new thing, in a different location – this is generally how I sense your various projects working.

Patricia Zarate: It is my experience of a location or an object in a place that is important to me. I think that I’ve been concerned with taking an experience – a place in time, perception – a feeling or idea and translating or transforming that into a physical object. The installation I made at The Queens Museum in New York is an early example of how I translate my experiences into object. I was still working exclusively in black and white and the imagery was representational. At the time, I had been making 3 x 3 inch grid-drawings on paper, each cell had a drawing. It was very graphic and I wanted to somehow translate it into a larger space. I worked in my studio trying to figure out how and what I wanted. For the exhibition I used two adjoining walls, drawing a one row grid measuring 1 x 312 inches, each alternating one-inch cell had a drawing. The placement of the work was vital, from a distance it looked like a solid line, as the viewer came closer the imagery unfolded…

Just came across this interview with Steve Reich published in Frieze Magazine back in 2006:

“Steve Reich is one of the most important American composers of the past 40 years. With influences including Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, John Coltrane, African drumming, Balinese Gamelan and Hebrew sacred music, Reich’s music has been a major inspiration for subsequent generations of musicians such as Brian Eno, Bang On a Can and Sunn0))). Often misdescribed as ‘minimalist’, Reich’s music is characterized by a complex integration of harmonic invention and rhythmic construction; from groundbreaking early works using multiple tape loops and a rigorous focus on process, through multimedia collaborations with his wife, the artist Beryl Korot, to his recent major compositions for voice and orchestra You Are (Variations) (2004) and Daniel Variations (premiered this autumn). On the occasion of ‘Steve Reich @ 70’, an international series of concerts celebrating the composer’s 70th birthday, Dan Fox and Mark Godfrey talk to him about his music and relationship to visual art

Mark Godfrey: From the beginning of your practice there’s been a strong relationship between your music and the visual arts. You were aware of seriality in American art in the mid-1960s, as in the work of Sol LeWitt, for example. However, seriality meant something completely different in terms of the dominant European music of the time. Could you explain a little what the difference is between seriality in music and seriality in visual art?

Steve Reich: In serial music the 12-tone series of notes has no harmonic relationship between one note and another, and cannot really be heard as a pattern. Maybe Pierre Boulez could hear it, but this was something most musicians would have to take on faith, not something they could perceive as listeners. Visual serial art was very obviously repeating a given image or varying it in some way that one could walk into a room and immediately grasp it. You see Andy Warhol’s many Mona Lisas, and within five seconds you know you are looking at many Mona Lisas – you don’t have to be given a theory. In my music what I was striving for was something much more connected with American serial art. It was a rejection of European musical seriality…”

Brent: Color scales, gray scales, drums, unwrapped columns, the feel of folds, all different measures of light that sometimes manifest as light ‘actually’, though all together register as interest in how things unfold, expose, and fold back – that draw attention to form while somewhat masquerading with it – Linda, what is the common thread that runs through your work?

Linda: Interesting that you refer to my work as folds, literal, or as a manner of speech—each way is interesting. For me everything I do leads back to light and space. What I am after is capturing a sense of space and how light naturally opens, informs, and suggests. When you concentrate on the one aspect [light] the other [space] becomes an irrevocable subject that needs attention. Each aspect involves the other, not altogether different from how we experience ‘real things’, or how nature informs. Actually the canvas itself stands in for a sort of space also. It’s a complex relation where you try to tie the two by engaging a process, sometimes ignoring one for the other. Looking for a reconciliation, accepting what is done, and further working through the given…in a manner. Eventually there exists a tension. The work, also, is as much about darkness as it is light.

At this point it’s probably quite important to mention that though my work may appear distant and concrete, or minimal, more or less the result of a mechanical process (especially when it’s photographed or digitally reproduced) -, this is not the case in reality! When it is reproduced the little irregularities in my work caused by hand and the under ground aren’t noticeable. And that’s a pity because it is a deliberate choice that they are seen. Human touch is allowed in my work, if not necessary. As I said: my work is about finding and combining opposites. This means that the tension between mechanical and handmade must also have its place, must be shown, to be felt and to have its indescribable effect…

Don Voisine, Buzz, 2009
Oil on wood
17 × 17 inches

“A week after the opening of his exhibit of a new group of paintings, which will be on view at McKenzie Fine Art Inc, located at 511 West 25th Street, till June 6, 2009, the painter Don Voisine visited the Rail’s Headquarters to talk with Assistant Art Editor Ben La Rocco, and contributing writer Craig Olson about his life and work.

Ben La Rocco: Lets talk about your early life in Maine.

Don Voisine: I was born in Fort Kent, Maine in 1952. Fort Kent is a northern border town on the western-most edge of New Brunswick just 10 miles from the Quebec border. The majority of townspeople are of Acadian descent and speak French, the principal industry is potato farming and lumbering. My father died when I was three and my mother never remarried. She worked two jobs to support and raise three kids. From the time we were ten we also worked part time and after school…”

Lynne Harlow, Four Kicks, 2005
Pair of plexiglas boxes, 4 x 24 x 24 inches
 

Brent: What are you currently working on?

Lynne: I’m working the way I most like to, doing several different things at once. I have just completed a site-specific piece for a group show, I’m playing around with painted balsa wood strips that I’m gluing into shapes and, most significantly, I’m preparing for a collaborative project coming up this summer in Houston, TX. A terrific artist in Houston, Ariane Roesch, has organized the project and she has paired me with Brett Davidson, a writer currently living in Zurich. I’ve never collaborated with a writer before and it’s very good new territory for me. The current pieces continue to explore the question that’s central to how, and why, I work: how little is enough?…

Devin Powers, Untitled, 2008
Installati0n, enamel and latex on wall 

Brent: The structure of space, theoretical models such as n-space and the hyper-cube usually lose most of us even in adult life. However you had an interest in this as a child. How did this fascination arrive?

Devin: Well, I was no child prodigy. In fact, I was born dyslexic. I did not learn how to read until around the forth grade and it was a few more years till I could honestly say I was a fluent reader and several more before I became confident in writing. In an odd way, this deficit propelled me toward asking and thinking about big questions early on. My parents are well educated and impressed upon me the value of education not just as a method of upward mobility but for its own inherent value. I believed them. Books became these mysterious venerate objects to me that contained great secrets that everyone else had access to except me. I deeply wanted to read in order to gain access to this knowledge. I believed that there was some deep mystery I did not have the pass code to and I wanted to know it, I wanted to know everything. I remember fantasizing as a boy that if I had a superpower it would be the ability to instantly absorb and comprehend any book I had contact with. I pictured myself visiting the Harvard libraries and being immediately inundated by the immense tidal force of knowledge housed within its walls. I could not imagine any better power. Understanding was everything…

Lisa Beck: To Everything (Rays), 2008
Acrylic paint on canvas; 72 x 97.25 inches

June 4-28, 2009

Interview with Lisa Beck

The third of three exhibitions on the psycholoptical.

For the twenty something years, I have known Lisa Beck, the migration of the circle or sphere from one realm of meaning into another has been at the heart of her investigation. Thru her use of simple formal devices including repetition, size, and spatial relationships, she creates an exchange between the visible and the invisible that saturates this elemental shape or form with resonance and duration. Though she is more intuitive than scientific, the air in her work establishes that reasoning is definitely inserted into her personal calculations. Consider her an investigative reporter fascinated by observations of how the philosophy and science of the experience of existence is embedded in the magnified moments in our day to day. She is on the scene yet in the background, working from the mind’s eye.

Feature: Seems you’ve made big jumps recently both with vocabulary and technique.

Lisa Beck: I suppose so, although almost everything in these paintings has appeared in my work before, just not all together. In this batch of work, I tried to think and plan as little as possible — no rules, everything on the table.

F: Do you prepare for your paintings with sketches or studies?

LB: I do drawings that lead up to the paintings, but only very rarely do they turn out exactly as the lead up work. Even if I occasionally try to transfer an idea exactly from a drawing to a painting, it never stays the way it starts. There are always adjustments, accidents and new ideas that pop up while I am working.

F: Why b/w; why no color?

LB: It felt right. These pieces are very much involved with bipolarity/symmetry, and the opposition of black and white seems appropriate. A black and white image is not going to be confused with reality- so it can be depictive and abstract at the same time. The lack of color permits a different kind of scrutiny, to structure and content.

You know that I did primarily black and white work for about 10 years. Then color crept in, and took over and now it’s drained out again. I’m not sure why it comes or goes, but I can equate it to black and white versus color photography. Though I like color photos a lot, I’ve always been drawn to black and white images- they are both analytical and moody. Some of these pieces do have a sort of homeopathic amount of color in them, but it is more felt than seen.

F: Would you comment on your use of examining, ordering, repeating, and reflecting?

LB: The two-panel works fall into two categories. Some of the paintings have “rhyming,” symmetrical elements – what happens when the imagery is flipped and repeated from panel to panel. In this way an arbitrary set of choices gets an ordered interpretation. The others may incorporate some mirrored elements, but do not repeat imagery on each panel. Those have to do with the idea of creating a situation and then exposing or examining what is outside of it, the contributing factors, if you will. So it’s taking a considered set of choices and bombarding it with a random element.

F: Maybe im overreacting but there are many straight lines in this new work, the circle seems threatened… what’s going on?

LB: There, there, don’t worry. Circles are pretty invulnerable. Anyway, they’re still there, sometimes more in the background or as a reference in radiant sets of lines or shapes.

F: I dont remember you using soft edges or brush work that clearly uses or leaves brush marks; how did you get into that so quickly? Is your interest in this soft somehow connected to its conceptual relationship to round?

LB: More visible brushwork probably came around after some ink drawings that I did on prepared mylar. The ink sticks, but it can’t soak in and dries in weird, puddle-y ways. I’ve always been interested in the meeting places between things, whether soft or hard, and have used gradients or blended areas for a long time. As to why I’m interested in softness…I could analyze it and come to a conceptual reason in retrospect, but I’ll just have to say again, it felt right.

F: Outside of two or so rather atypical quoting incidents in some works on paper from a few years ago, this is the first time I’ve seen you include a figure.

LB: That’s true, but the last time I checked it wasn’t against the law.

F: True, tho in terms of what artists do and how they work, a move from a long term commitment to abstraction into figuration and its resulting reference to landscape, is considered a pretty big thing. What is it about you or your work now that brought about including it?

LB: To me there isn’t such a hard line between figuration and abstraction- both are representations of ideas, and in a sense you could say a painting of a circle is more “realistic” than a painting of a figure or a landscape. But that aside, in my more abstracted works a lot of the arrangements of elements I used before were based on landscape or scientific images anyway and I saw them as referring to structures or skeletons under what is seen in nature. In using elements like circles, gradients and mirroring, I had molecules, stars, horizons, clouds and lakes in the back of my mind. In this new work, they are just more visible. And I suppose once I went there, there was no reason a figure couldn’t be one of the elements too. I don’t want to have to choose sides between figure/ground or abstraction/depiction — after all, we are made of the same stuff as the environment we are in. It’s all a bunch of somewhat organized matter, except that we seem to be able to be aware of it.

F: In the past you’ve addressed emotional situations quietly and intellectually, but a number of these new works feel charged up.

LB: Yes.

F: It does seem that your works come out of real experiences, what kinds of things inspire you?

LB: When my son was in elementary school he had to do an exercise that was meant to introduce an awareness of context and broaden the sense of place and scale. The kids had to write their address like this:

Your name, your room, your house number, your street, your neighborhood, Brooklyn, New York, USA, North America, Northern Hemisphere, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Virgo Supercluster, the Universe.

And then the other way: The Universe, Virgo Supercluster, Milky Way Galaxy, Solar System, Earth, Northern Hemisphere, North America, USA, New York, Brooklyn, your neighborhood, your street, your house number, your room, your name.

Interesting difference, right?

Walking around, being alive, and thinking about the amazing set of coincidences and confluences that made that possible is very inspiring.

Read the complete interview

Brent Hallard: You have been working on areas of color; vertical or horizontal bands of either matte paint or gloss paint with sometimes both present in the one painting at the same time. The structure between two areas of color, you couldn’t really call it a line, though, well, in the material – a space where something stops and then something starts.

You have used aluminum supports for some time now. They sit well, both functioning as unadorned surface where paint can just glide over, and as a sheer and clean plane on which to see the color, the paint.

What brought you to use these supports? Do you do all the preparation yourself? If so could you tell what that entails to get something to sit on the wall, for paint to sit upon the support?

Kasarian Dane: I’ve been using aluminum since about 1996 or so. I discovered it as a painting support in graduate school at The Art Institute of Chicago. I was making these fairly reductive paintings on canvas and was really struggling with what to do with the sides of the canvas: do I paint the edges of the canvas? Do I tape the sides so they stay clean? Are the sides of the canvas with the paint build up an important index of the process or a distraction from what’s happening on the surface plane? How thick or thin should I make the stretcher? I tried a lot of different ideas with this, thick stretchers, thin stretchers, etc. and it was not satisfying. The sides of the canvas were always another plane to deal with in relationship to the surface plane, and I was just not interested in making paintings on the sides of my paintings…

For three hours, twice a week, artist Bibi Calderaro “shows up for work” at a white formica-top desk in the café at P.S.1, in an ongoing performance of her work, PRESENT, part of the Minus Space exhibit (which has been extended through May 4). On the desk are a manual typewriter, a stack of well-worn books, and an “out-box” where Bibi places typewritten thoughts that are her responses to readings. These pages of poetic insights and musings are offered to the public to carry away with them. On the wall behind the desk is a dark spiral shape on paper, which upon closer view is a list of book titles, books that Bibi is slowly working her way through, and sharing with her audience at P.S.1. An intimidating but intriguing group of books, seemingly covering almost every topic you can imagine, this list, and the wonderful generosity of sharing her search with random strangers, is what inspired me to conduct an online interview with the artist.

Karen Schifano: What is it like to be out in a public space doing your own personal search, one that normally one does in a library or at home on the laptop, and also connecting socially and intellectually with the audience at P.S.1? Do you feel self-conscious, or exposed in any way – or do you enjoy the interactions? Any anecdotes to share?

Bibi Calderaro: I have never been able to read in the silence of the library. I need a constant but low- level noise to help me concentrate in what I’m reading. The fact that there is no formal audience helps me do my thing as well. For the most part while I read the people around me are not even aware of me performing. It is only when I start typing that they realize something is taking place other than just a casual reader by the corner, or when they go around the room looking at the art in the show that they see the out-box with my typed thoughts and might stop to ask what I’m doing. Some of these sporadic chats are long, maybe hours. A few weeks ago a lovely person stopped by for a brief time in the beginning and then came back after seeing the rest of the shows at P.S.1, pulled a chair by my side and chatted with me for more than an hour. Another time, just as I was getting ready to leave and had my last thought of the day out, a woman who had been sitting across from my desk approached me and showed happiness and gratitude for the fact that I was giving out a written piece. Then her friend got closer and upon reading my thought over her shoulder exclaimed “Oh but that’s just you!”

Throughout the development of this piece my writing has changed quite a bit. In the beginning I might have used some pronouns, where after a few weeks at work I erased them from my vocabulary almost completely, trying to condense a thought to its most abstract yet open possibilities. It is quite amazing to me that such a thought could touch someone’s core self so that that person recognizes herself in it.

KS: So what led you to the idea for this performance?

BC: I search for and aim at a more direct experience with art, both from within myself and from the viewer/spectator. I think performance was a logical development within my overall art practice. Certain aspects of my last and only performance were not fulfilling though. Although what attracts me is the impermanence of performance, I was unsatisfied with the relationship with space and context that it lacked. Having been invited to participate in the Minus Space show, it was clear to me that performance was the way to go.

One early morning I walked past a coffee-place and saw a person reading and writing by the window, no laptop involved. I immediately fell in love with the idea of going back to reading and writing without the help of an electronic device, going back to books and handwriting or typing mechanically and leaving a physical trace of the process involved in thinking, writing, languaging.

KS: Would you explore your title a bit? I remember you saying that there are three different ways of reading the word “Present”. Could you elaborate on this? In your accompanying statement for the piece, you mention Walter Benjamin’s concept of history. Can you explain what that is, and discuss why it’s important to you at this time to delve into the area of study that you’re sharing with the audience at P.S.1?

BC: I just recently thought of the possibility of ideas being able to wilt. If this is so, it is because in some level they are alive, they are born or aborted, they are nurtured or not, they die instantly or survive our many doubts, they rot if you keep them for too long without transforming them into something else (a text, a materiality, a gesture of love, an action), also if one is to tautologize them into the obvious they can refuse to go beyond the immediate. They also wilt if kept for too long with the same water —is our brain also 70% fluids? I wonder about these things as I think of the title for the action I am conducting at P.S.1: Present.

It is in the present as the elusiveness of the duration of each moment that one may rescue a thought or let it go. I wonder how an author who writes novels experiences this, and how it was in times of Cervantes, when it was all handwritten, no aids of typewriter or computers. I also delve into the possibility of the discarded thought as materiality.

To present is to allow for the thought to go forward, to give some air and light, some watering, some extra thought, to the first intuition. It also immediately involves the other, since one would not talk about presenting a thought to oneself, but rather giving it some sort of legible shape so that another subjectivity may grasp some kind of meaning from it.

It is also in the present as a gift that I think of both when the thought is brought about in whichever organ it is that it first develops, and as the thoughts being put out there as text, as a piece of work on a humble piece of paper, as part of a fluid poem with no end in sight and that is already around the world in the hands of so many people who have taken them.

Present is also a present in the form of time that enables the thoughts of others to present themselves to me.

It would be wonderful if we could live as human beings in this entangled world of words with only the present in mind. It has been and still is the practice of many to stay in touch with the present, to allow only the present to be present, and not have pre-sent thoughts about the future, near or far. But we have memories and thus we have traditions which we are free (are we really?) to follow or not. And so we have a history, a heavily loaded history with many, many words. Some of which have been set in stone, some others just on paper, and now in cyberspace. Throughout the millennia we have managed to follow some of these thoughts, interpreting and re-interpreting them with no end.

One of my aims in Present is to search for the moments in which an author has allowed his/her subjectivity —consciously or unconsciously, whether we think that’s a possibility or not— to take over their thoughts, their main thesis. The image of the snowball comes to mind, as a small thought that is translated into words, then rolls onto another subjectivity where it catches on and becomes bigger and bigger, covered by more and more snow-words. Yet this new bigger snowball is not the original snow-word, it is just there, covering it. As the snowball rolls throughout history, one can only imagine the original snow-words being kept small and nuclear within the core of huge traditional snowballs. Only in an avalanche is it possible for the original snow-words to become free of the weight they carry around as interpretations have piled upon them in snowflake shapes. This is what interests me of Benjamin’s idea of History. The way I understand him is there is always some violence involved in the uncovering of thoughts to their original. Yet, since we are not free from interpretation, we must build yet another context for these original words. It is in this process that we may find the only possibility for redemption as we take possession of one’s past. According to Benjamin we can only possess our past if we can quote it.

One of the many layers of Present is where I read texts in order to find quotes that I will use in a future performance. I have always felt an attraction for the meaning of words, their epistemological value, if we may put it that way. It has always amazed me usually how close words are to their original meaning, yet how covered this meaning is sometimes and how this drifting occurred.

When I choose the texts for the performance I am aware of the resonance each discipline may have with a present situation —i.e. economic, social, personal. I am after the original thought, the originating word for the snowballed theories that lead our lives today, in 2009, as a humanity that inhabits one world and who could have, by now, learnt to live together in peace, harmony and with respect for each other as individuals in difference. Could this be called inter-subjectivity —and can it replace globalization?

KS: Is this “snow-word thought”, the original thought, also the place where the author allows his/her subjectivity to take over their ideas? How do you tell the difference between the original thought/idea, and all of the layers that have accrued over time? Are you also thinking about the myths we live by, and how our own subjectivities would influence how we receive these ideas?

Years ago I read some of the French poststructuralist philosophers and I remember the notion that language seems to be structured by the particular time in which is it being used, and so thought is almost held captive by its context. One would have to analyze the syntax of the language itself to extricate the meanings behind the words. And we in the present, in our own particular historical context, would never entirely understand. (I may have this confused though). Anyway what kinds of ideas/books are you following – I know that the list is part of the documentation for the performance – what areas are of interest to you in this search?

BC: Areas of interest: how thought is formed, how theories are formed, how both of these are engrained or not in culture and vice-versa, what role does language play in this process, the possibilities and conditions for communication. As well, how do we as societies construct behaviors that lead to responsibility, civility, free individuals (do we?); what are the limits of individuality and what conditions are necessary for subjects to engage in inter-subjective processes, how do these extrapolate to group behavior.

Gorgias, the Greek philosopher, is claimed to have theorized in his lost work On Nature or the Non-Existent about exactly the above, saying that

1- Nothing exists;

2- Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and

3- Even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.

Then again, I am still searching, curious; open to communication.

In a lecture about Kant and a re-reading of modernist art after his aesthetic theories, David Carrie, one of the panelists, ended by saying that it is usually the case that experience overthrows the system. I think this is exactly what I mean when I say that people’s own subjectivities bleed into their theories, just as they must bleed into their systems of belief. I just don’t know how it could be thought to be otherwise, even with the most deadpan, watertight theories. Could I prove this? Take it out of the realm of the intuitive and make it itself a theory? Not sure. I have in my list of future readings a category of biographies of certain thinkers. Yet, then again, these are all interpretations.

The other day I watched a PBS documentary titled “ The Ascent of Money,” where many so-called economists basically state that underlying all of the economic theories, their reasons to behave one way or the other are intuitive, have to do with their ability to read these intuitions and act accordingly than with a rational understanding of a given situation.

KS: So what I wonder, then, is what do you/the theorists mean by “intuition”? What makes it up, what determines it. How are emotions interconnected with thought such that a sense of the “rightness” of an idea is arrived at. How do you separate an individual’s particular psychological make-up from their sociological situation, and then the larger history. How do we figure out who to believe and why – would it be because we share similar subjective structures? I have a feeling that you’re looking for universals, and maybe even a spiritual foundation to our historical meanderings: the constant parts of what we call human nature. Am I right?

BC: Well, maybe. For one thing there seem to be no constants, except for the fact that all human beings have the capability of thought and feeling. But then there is the time factor which, applied to the development of civilizations, has been called history and which as well has many different ways of being approached. So let’s go word by word of your long question, and I’m not even sure I can answer or begin to unravel each of them correctly.

“Intuition”

BC: Ha! Like I can explain here centuries of thinking about it…let’s give it a try, or at least highlight what’s important for me, here. But in any case what we’re dealing with always is knowledge and how to get at it, I guess. Kant says we cannot apprehend the world in its absolute reality, that Reason is our tool for it but that it is limited and hence there is always a Concept, an Idea, which is not reachable. Bergson, a century and a half later, comes back to it. So did many other philosophers before and after him. Bergson believes there’s two ways in which an object can be known: absolutely and relatively, and that there is a method through which each mode of knowledge can be gained. The latter’s method is what Bergson calls analysis, while the method of intuition belongs to the former. Intuition is an experience of sorts, which connects us to the things themselves in themselves. Bergson defined intuition as a simple, indivisible experience of sympathy through which one is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it. The absolute that is grasped is always perfect in the sense that it is perfectly what it is, and infinite in the sense that it can be grasped as a whole through a simple, indivisible act of intuition, yet lends itself to boundless enumeration when analysed. The one thing it is certain one can grasp from within through sympathy is the self. Intuition begins with placing oneself within the Duration.

It seems to me that intuition is always related to a direct experience of something, to a non-rational, first-hand, empathic approach to the thing (the world, knowledge). Other people take intuition to be independent of prior experience and knowledge. I don’t share this. I think it is infused with prior experience, knowledge and memory.

“A sense of the rightness of an idea”

BC: Ha ha ha. This I guess is absolutely related to the idea of truth and how it comes to relate to the communication of the idea, the thing, the world. Because the problem is there is a world out there and first we don’t know how to “apprehend” it, then we don’t know how to communicate our apprehension of it (remember Gorgias). Ay! It’s getting complicated and I don’t have a PhD in philosophy. So many philosophers by now have worked on the problem inherent in language and how it just doesn’t produce/communicate truth, except maybe through poetry.

Then I think of my project Present and I could, and have been, claiming that what I am doing is writing a long poem whose connection is precisely my Duration. Other philosophers have emphasized that everything is interpretation and nothing can escape it. So really there would be no possible rightness to any of these theorists’ ideas, only interpretations. How do I know whether I’m hitting at the idea the way its author intended me to? But then if all these ideas/theories are put to practical trial via their implementation in different activities, (be it physics, economics, medicine, history, philosophy, etc.) the only way we have to measure our successes in the interpretations of the former is through the results they yield. And then we correct ourselves this way or the other, usually we go in zigzags, or in opposites, I guess because our experience tells us that if A didn’t work, then B must be able to work. I mean the most I’m reading these days about the collapse of the financial world, all these theorists are saying is we haven’t been able to learn from History…

“How do you separate an individual’s particular psychological make-up from their sociological situation, and then the larger history?”

BC: There is a puddle of water that is an abyss in this. I’m not sure I can separate it, or cross it, although of course I could, I should, but I won’t.

“How do we figure out who to believe and why…?”

BC: Ha, ha ha, hahahaha haaaaaaaa (I’m falling in the abyss now, come help me please!!?). I’m not even sure it is about believing, maybe only resonating with?

“I have a feeling that you’re looking for universals, and maybe even a spiritual foundation to our historical meanderings: the constant parts of what we call human nature.”

I don’t think I am looking for universals, I think I am looking for the thought processes/emotional baggage that has brought us where we are, which is obviously always in flux, shifting, the process and its contents. So is my piece, in constant flux, since it is inherently impossible to pin down a moment, a thought, an experience, an interpretation that would include all the others. But for sure it has to do with the spiritual and with how to approach a development of sorts that could be called a history.

“Am I right?”

BC: Yes and no. I guess instead we’re having this conversation, which is much better than a right or a wrong.

Two quotes from Sebald’s Austerlitz:

“…our most powerful projects are the ones that betray in the most evident way our degree of insecurity…”

“…the growing understanding that everything is decided in movement and not in immobility…”

If words are not possible and silence isn’t either, what is the exact measure of language?

Bibi Calderaro’s collected writings from Present will be compiled and published in book form and sold in the bookstore at P.S.1. It should be available in the next month or so.

All photos courtesy of Marcelo Brodsky.

Books Read During PRESENT, P.S.1, October 2008 – April 2009

The Idea of Usury, B. Nelson
The Rule of Mars, edited by C. Biaggi
The world of Goods, M. Douglas and B Zaberwood
La potencia del pensamiento, G. Agamben
Evolution of the Social Contract, B. Skyrms
On Certainty, L. Wittgenstein
Un Coup de Des Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard, Mallarmé
Le Bruissement de la Langue, R. Barthes
Teoría poética y estética, P. Valéry
The Gift, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, L. Hyde
On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics, C. E. Scott
Transcending Capitalism, H. Brick
Lujo y Capitalismo, W. Sombart
The Origins of the Economy, F. Pryor
How to do Things with Words, J.L. Austin
Endgame, S. Beckett
A Short History of Ethics, A. MacIntyre
La filosofía moral contemporánea, W. H. Hudson
Agua Viva, C. Lispector
Capital Profits and Prices, D. Hausman
Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason, J. Copjec
Citizen Thoreau, H.D. Thoreau
Our Immoral Soul, N. Bonder
Profit Over People, N. Chomsky
La filosofía actual – Pensar sin certezas, D. Scavino
Handbook of Inaesthetics, A. Badiou
Gorgias, Plato
Being and Event, A. Badiou
On the Name, J. Derrida
The Shorter Socratic Writings, Xenophon
Wittgenstein and the Problem of other Minds, H. Morick
Hot Thought, Thagard
A Derrida Dictionary, N. Lucy
Wittgenstein: a Life, B. McGuiness
World and Life as One, M. Stokhof
Key Writings, L. Irigaray
Spinoza and Other Heretics, Yovel
Dialogues, Jakobson + Pomorska
The Impossible Question, J. Krishnamurti
The Mystery of Capital, H. de Soto
Labyrinth, Wilson
Exploring Complexity, Nicolis and I. Prigogine
Order out of Chaos, I. Prigogine and Stengers
Fear. The History of a Political Idea, C. Robin
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. Kuhn
Labyrinth of Time, K. Penderecky
The Question of Value, J. Hans
Nine Chains to the Moon, B. Fuller
Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge, P. Muna
And it Came to Pass, Not to Stay, B. Fuller
Identity and Reality, E. Meyerson
I Seem to be a Verb, B. Fuller
The Theory of Absence, P. Fuery

Brent: Of course the first impression I get with your collage work (we may as well start there) is that it rings Japanese: The color, the quirkiness, and freshness – the level and sense of reserve and adornment. Though that’s too simple. Quirkiness and perhaps freshness has been picked up, more fetishized, by western media, so we’ll leave that for a moment. And as you are not in Japan, and have settled in a different environment, I’m going to leave the Japanese thing aside as well – for the moment. Sensibilities, or where the work comes from probably will flow naturally without the need to make some grand cultural point.

That said, if I didn’t live here, I don’t know if I would have got the collage work that you do, as well as I think I do. Simply said I enjoy and feel it. It’s very much part of this culture’s fabric. Said from someone who is still coming to terms with what that fabric is. In the process, so to speak – never expecting to get there, of course, but open to the process.

I wouldn’t mind starting with ways of looking. And perhaps how you see something that interests you. How you pick that up, give it some attention, notice its qualities, what memory that triggers, its instance, and some of the more intriguing background operatives, how you are thinking when you move that into that position.

Shinsuke: I am interested in encountering activities and accidents that convert or flip over concepts, stereotypes and prejudices. As an artist, I am trying to create artwork that suggests to the audience several different points of view toward things and phenomena around them…

Richard Roth, Full Cleveland, 2007
Flashe on Birch plywood
11 3/8 x 8 x 4 inches

Brent Hallard: It seems to me that no matter where you position yourself to take these paintings in there are always two states forthcoming, though perhaps not always on view at the same time. Separately these different moods evoke, for example in ‘Full Cleveland’ or ‘Happy Hour’, the carnival and serene. When the two states mesh, it’s generally considered that a third state arrives. Though in your paintings, Richard, the third state is already there, as a three-dimensional completed painting, something that we need to move around to see. In ‘Plywood Violin’ the mood swings are less obvious, perhaps operating more as object/surface/spatial disorientation—naughty austere.

Richard Roth: Mentioning “states” and “moods” is an interesting way to begin our discussion of paintings that are extremely abstract and highly reductive – and it pleases me. First of all, I do not consciously try to insert meaning into the paintings; though I am delighted that the paintings are seen as carriers of moods and that they contain such readings or multiple readings. I am interested in and draw ideas from a wide range of artifacts and disciplines such as product and package design, visual perception, nature, architecture, popular culture, custom cars, and fashion. As these influences interact with specific formal concerns, as well as my riffing on the three-dimensional structure of the support, it is hoped that a certain power/depth is achieved in the fusion. “Full Cleveland” for example, when viewed frontally, is a straightforward horizontal stripe configuration, but when informed by its side-view, the stripes become components of a dynamic red and white object that appears to be formed by extrusion. In the end, I expect the paintings to be open to anything, conceptually informal rather than formal – so, your observation of “Plywood Violin” – “naughty austere,” sits well with me. I much like this quotation by Vitaly Komar (on the work of Komar and Melamid) in relationship to my work and to painting in general: “Generally, art wavers between being closer to a book or closer to a rug – more conceptual or more decorative. Our work is somewhere in between. We try to make conceptual rugs.”…