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Portrait of the artist as a biker, Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Grenoble, Franceposted October 9th, 2009
Steven Parrino, Untitled, 1993 October 11, 2009 – January 3, 2010 The MAGASIN is starting its season with a portrait of the artist Olivier Mosset. The exhibition takes the form of a tribute, gathering works by different artists, but never showing Olivier Mossetʼs own work. The artists are of all generations, from Carl André to Stéphane Kropf including the famous group of artists 1m3 among the youngest. As a key figure of the artistic scene and part of a family with the same artistic sensitivity, Olivier Mosset keeps close links with them. He collects or swaps works with them. He has today gathered an important collection, most of which was offered to the Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds. Other works are to be found at the MAMCO in Geneva, the Consortium in Dijon and in Tucson. The exhibition aims at drawing a portrait of the artist through a series of rooms organized around different specific subjects. A first room will introduce his roots, with Chardinʼs engravings (given each year by his grandfather to his colleagues), or Gregoire Müllerʼs portrait. Another one will highlight portraits of Olivier Mosset with Steven Parrinoʼs photographs of him and acrylic paintings by Walter Steding. Another room will reveal quotations, borrowings and copies (from Hugo Pernet in particular). The following rooms will show monochrome paintings, floor-based works, and the indestructible link between Olivier Mosset and the bikers world. Participating Artists: Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era, by Christine Mehring, Yale University Press, 2009posted August 30th, 2009
Click to purchase on Amazon Twenty-one-year-old Peter Heisterkamp began signing his colorful and playful abstract artworks Palermo in 1964, when peers noted his resemblance to the American gangster Frank “Blinky” Palermo. This handsome book—a historical and critical study of Palermo’s painting from the time he entered Joseph Beuys’ now famous class at the Düsseldorf academy in 1964 to his death in 1977—explores his significance for postwar and abstract art. Christine Mehring notes that over the course of Palermo’s brief career he created five concurrent but distinct bodies of work: objects, cloth-pictures, wall-paintings, metal-pictures, and collaborative projects, primarily with his friend and colleague Gerhard Richter. Mehring shows how each of these groups demonstrates Palermo’s efforts to lead German art out of its international isolation and to transform modernist painting into historically resonant abstraction by incorporating artifice, humor, period colors, and play. Christine Mehring is associate professor of art history at The University of Chicago. Ivo Ringe: Painting in the Moment, Schaltwerk Kunst, Hamburg, Germanyposted May 1st, 2009
Ivo Ringe, California, 2008 May 8-23, 2009 Ivo Ringe creates a reductive, non-objective picture plane in his paintings, where the viewer’s sensory perception may directly unfold. His works are rich in concrete structure and movement. The artist applies numerous layers of brush strokes which form a rhizome-like, grid pattern against the nearly monochromatic or bicolor backgrounds. In this way, a multidirectional, continuous movement is created which dynamically effects the painting as well as the surrounding room. In some works, this structure appears to grow, endlessly expanding beyond the borders of the painting. In other works, the strokes of color create a closed form which contains a network-like, inner structure. Monumental in their appearance, these works seem to optically enter the real space in front of the canvas. In so doing, they come to nearly resemble sculptures. As the gestural structure of the colors overlap with one another, the eye of the viewer is drawn into the depths of a complex, multidimensional space. In his artistic process, Ivo Ringe abandons all predetermined images in order to devote his consciousness fully to the moment of creation. For this reason, he also speaks of his work as “Painting in the Moment”. The color choice for each painting varies according to the artist’s desired emphasis for that work. The blended colors are applied, layer by layer, one over another. From the wealth of his experience, the vibration of colors is masterfully balanced. For the viewer, they meld into an experience of the senses. Ivo Ringe (born 1951 in Bonn, Germany) lives and works in Cologne. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Rolf Sackenheim at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf during the 1970s. Talking Art: Interviews with Artists Since 1976posted January 15th, 2009
Purchase on Amazon.com Since it was founded in 1976, Art Monthly magazine has consistently published interviews with leading contemporary artists. The interviews collected in this book offer unique insights into the thought processes and working practices of artists. From Russian Constructivists of the 1920s to Turner Prize winners, this collection of interviews constitutes an entertaining and alternative history of 20th-century art written in the first person. Contributors include: Naum Gabo, Clement Greenberg, Victor Pasmore, Robert Motherwell, Agnes Martin, Anthony Caro, Brice Marden, Alan Charlton, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, John Baldessari, Hanne Darboven, Hans Haacke, Richard Serra, Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Michael Snow, Gilbert & George, David Tremlett, Jasper Johns, George Segal, Claes Oldenburg, Mark Boyle, Gustav Metzger, Ed Ruscha, Patrick Caulfield, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, RB Kitaj, Ilya Kabakov, Leon Golub, Joseph Beuys, Stephen Willats, Barbara Kruger, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Jeff Wall, Liam Gillick, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Bill Woodrow, Sophie Calle, Gary Hill, Jimmie Durham, Thomas Struth, Willie Doherty, Mark Wallinger, Anya Gallaccio, Steve McQueen, Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean, Simon Patterson, Angela Bulloch, & Mike Nelson. Edited by Patricia Bickers and Andrew Wilson Imi Knoebel, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NYposted January 6th, 2009
Imi Knoebel, Ich Nicht IX, 2006 January 8 – February 14, 2009 Mary Boone Gallery presents an exhibition of recent works by Imi Knoebel. Born in 1940 in Dessau, Germany, Imi Knoebel was preeminent among the students of Joseph Beuys at the influential Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. There he began to question the conventions and objectives of creating art. Knoebel’s work has since conjoined painting, sculpture, and architecture, culminating in the purist investigation of space, picture support and color of his recent works. The large “paintings” in the present show are constructions that layer and juxtapose grids of monochrome strips with planes of pure color. These modular components propose seemingly endless variations on the relationship of abstraction to geometry and form. Imi Knoebel’s epic painting cycle “24 Colors – for Blinky” (1977) is currently installed at Dia: Beacon, in Beacon, New York. A major retrospective of Knoebel’s work will open at the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin in Summer 2009. Imi Knoebel: Works 1966-2006, by Wolfram Hogrebe, Johannes Stüttgen, Martin Schulz, Dirk Martin, Franz-Joachim Verspohl, Published by Kerber, 2008posted September 28th, 2008
Click to purchase on Amazon.com Born in Dessau in 1940, Imi Knoebel is a leading figure of 1960s abstraction. He was a student in Joseph Beuys’ master class when he began to seriously question the role of the image in painting, and by 1968 he had formulated the foundation of his practice in the seminal installation “Raum 19,” which has continued to influence his work. Working in between painting and sculpture, Knoebel layers individual elements which are repeatedly juxtaposed in ever-changing variations. Over the course of his nearly five decade-long career, he has continually moved between intuition and calculation, always finding innovative ways to investigate geometric form and color. This precise retrospective volume with comprehensive texts by Dirk Martin, Johannes Stuttgen and Franz-Joachin Verspohl, among others, presents a grouping of works, made between 1966 and 2006, that were chosen by Knoebel for their fundamental importance in his practice. John Weber: In Memoriam (1932-2008)posted May 31st, 2008
Born in Los Angeles in 1932, New Yorker art dealer John Weber had a prominent role in the contemporary art world and was one of the first dealers in Soho in the 70s, leaving his mark on New York’s art scene of that period. Owner of the popular John Weber Gallery, which opened in West Broadway in Soho in 1971, he then moved to Chelsea in the ’90s where he began his rise in the art world. After leaving the Navy, Weber accepted a job at the Dayton Art Institute as member of the curatorial staff. Later he attended the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and worked for the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. He then made the successful move to the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles, where he was involved in many outstanding shows and worked with artists like Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Arman, Yves Klein, Franz Kline, Sol LeWitt, Andy Warhol, Richard Long, Jeff Koons, Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke and many more, collaborating as well with the Fluxus Group and the Arte Povera movement. (courtesy: Flash Art Magazine) Statements: Beuys, Flavin, Judd, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MNposted May 8th, 2008
Donald Judd, Untitled, 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.” Punk Noise & Paint, Interview with Mark Dagley, by Don Voisineposted April 1st, 2008
Abstract artist and musician Mark Dagley has been working in New York and Europe for over twenty-five years. Drawing from various postwar art movements and developments: Op Art, Washington Color School, Monochrome Painting, as well as European modes of art making, such as Support/Surface and Radical Painting, Mark has created a diffuse, yet particularly American body of work. Last spring Mark retrieved a group of paintings he had in storage at his parents’ home in Washington, D.C. Although dating from 1986-87, the paintings look to me as if they could have been done yesterday. The paintings do not look like historical pieces, reflective of a specific time, and they would not look out of place in a gallery today. I’ve found in them pop associations to video game, skate board, and surf cultures, though they still preserve a tie to the aforementioned precedents.
DV: Let’s go back a bit… Mark, you studied at the Corcoran in Washington, D.C. Did you study with any of the Washington Color people: Leon Berkowitz, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring?
MD: I was at the Corcoran during spring and summer of 1975, taking night and weekend classes in color theory and painting, while still attending high school. Raymond Wilkins, my art instructor at Oakton H.S., suggested these classes, since my interest in painting and sculpture went beyond what he was teaching. So they let me in. Maybe he pulled some strings. I don’t know.
Ed McGowin, Children, 1969 I took classes with Ed McGowin, whose early vacuum form plastic pieces still look good, and with Lowell Nesbitt, when he was available. They pretty much let me do what I wanted after the first few weeks. I was painting geometrically, more or less, from the beginning f my studies. Not much has changed with my work since then. I was very grateful–and relieved–that not only Wilkins but the Corcoran instructors had taken me seriously, even though I was only seventeen. They showed me a lot of valuable techniques and studio practice: from cleaning brushes to stretching large canvasses, to using masking tape and architectural templates and tools. Most importantly, I was taught how to apply acrylic and oils in different consistencies to get the effects I was seeing in the work of the D.C. color painters. My teachers also pointed me to the essays, books and magazines that any young artist should be familiar with. I was brought up to speed fairly quickly, shown that this was a real profession with a living history. Leon Berkowitz was chairman of the Corcoran’s painting department at that time. Gene Davis, who was quite a star then–about as big as a D.C. artist could be–was there too. Anne Truitt was still alive. Sam Gilliam and William De Looper were quite well known. Even as a student, it was clear to me that a great moment in painting had just passed in the city. Morris Louis had only died a dozen years previously. Color Field was still very much in the air. It was the official party line, so to speak.
Color Field Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, P Street was still the center of the D.C. art world then. The Henri Gallery, located there, had a Thomas Downing or a Gene Davis on the walls up until its closing, in the mid-90s. It was run by an old school grand dame who called herself Henri, pronounced with a French accent, though she otherwise sounded–and most likely was–completely American. Things were still 60s cool then, or at least she was. She wore sunglasses and fabulous baubles at all times of the day. I finally introduced myself to her about fifteen years ago and told her about my teenage trips to her gallery. She ended up taking some of my paintings on consignment, but died shortly thereafter. She left her vintage glove collection to my wife, a fellow glamour gal for whom she’d developed a fondness.
DV: You also studied at the Boston Museum School. The Museum of Fine Arts regularly held major exhibitions of the Color Field artists. As an art student in Portland, Maine in the early 70s, I would come down to Boston on field trips and see Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Ken Noland, Jules Olitski, or Larry Poons at the MFA, as well as Joan Snyder’s stroke paintings and Katherine Porter’s early zigzags at the galleries.
MD: Yes, I did attend school there for a short while. I have to say that it was, in many ways, a grave error. The dialogue with working artists that I had experienced in D.C. was sorely lacking. While Professors Natalie Alpert and Sandi Sloan showed some enthusiasm for the dozen of so geometric paintings and the selection of wooden reliefs that my father had helped me transport in a U-Haul trailer, there was little other interest in Color Field or geometric painting at the Boston Museum School.
Mark Dagley I couldn’t accept the school’s empty academic formalism. It seemed, in this environment, that painting as I had known it had been played out. Though I appreciated their positive feedback, I found Alpert’s paintings overly fussy and precious, and Sloan’s work at the time wasn’t very compelling to me. I missed the intrigue, the eccentricity, the cut and dry quality that is particular to the best of the D.C. painters.
Gene Davis It was big news when visiting artists like Alan Sonfist or Nancy Holt would arrive on campus. The students were supposed to assist them with a project, get some hands-on with a “pro.” I was the only one who helped Alan make 8-foot-high compost heaps in the school courtyard out of wet autumn leaves, lunchroom garbage and dog shit. I don’t think he liked the Museum School much after that. Neither did I. Guess I should’ve enrolled in the course they called “Winning!” Didn’t receive much, if anything, in terms of practical advice. After being told by instructors whose work was provincial at best, artists without any professional experience, that I would have to begin again–”Slow down a little, kid”–I went my own way, moved my art materials out of the student classrooms and started painting in my studio apartment. I never went back to the painting department, or showed anyone my geometric work again…until I moved to New York in 1979. The winter of ‘76 was so cold that the water in my toilet bowl actually froze. That’s when I started to plan my escape to the Big Apple.
DV: You are also very active as a musician. While in Boston, you were in an art rock post punk band, The Girls, which released a single produced by David Thomas on Pere Ubu’s own Hearthan label. Later, after you moved to New York, you formed a blues-based punk avant garde noise band, Hi Sheriffs of Blue, which also had an acclaimed underground reputation.
MD: Luckily the Museum School had a small electronic music studio with a few decent synthesizers and some other good gear. I hung out there with the other misfits, stoners and rock & rollers. At least they understood that the place was a total drag. I also discovered the photography and video studios, and the performance department, where all the cute arty girls were hanging out. That’s where I learned about Acconci, Beuys, Nauman, the Velvet Underground, Kraut Rock, Eno. I started going to the New England Conservatory of Music whenever John Cage gave a talk, also to MIT, which had the best videography department in town. Between 1976 and 1979, I met many of the artists and musicians I would later run into in the East Village: Pat Hearn, Mark Dirt, David Bowes, Nan Goldin, Jack & Dan Walworth, John Miller, Peter Dayton. We would check out parties and events over at Massachusetts College of Art, which was only a few blocks away. That seemed more like the Corcoran–you know, a real art school. I remember being impressed that you could buy art supplies right on campus. No such luck at the Museum School. And Mass Art had an actual stage, a sound system, lights–the whole works. Many of the instructors were professional artists, like Peter Campus and Don Burgy. We would take our videos over and do performances there. Peter Campus would show his latest work along with the students. By 1976 punk rock had entered everyone’s radar. I had seen Daved Hild, a classmate in electronic music lab, perform at the Museum School in gessoed clothes and white sunglasses with a woman named Pseudo Carol. Since I played guitar, I asked if I could join them. They said yes, but our band days were quite shortlived. Pseudo Carol moved on, and, after playing out a while as a duo, Daved and I set out to find some artists who wanted to start a Captain Beefheart/Kraut Rock type of group. Robin Amos became both our synthesizer and bass player, which wasn’t terribly convenient. We realized we needed a fourth on bass. Daved mentioned a guy named George, who was bringing his guitar to the T-shirt factory they worked at: a really good classical guitarist, funny as hell. A few weeks later, George Condo was in. We chose the most awful name we could think of that still sounded punk: The Girls.
The Girls, circa 1978 David Thomas heard us perform about a year later and brought us to Cleveland, into the same studio Pere Ubu worked out of. He produced our only single, which he released on his Hearthan label in the spring of 1979. By November of that year, the band had dissolved. George Condo and I left Boston for New York on an Amtrak train in late December with maybe $400 between us. After getting set up in the East Village, we started another group called Hi Sheriffs of Blue, modeled after the 1950s electric blues bands from Chicago and Detroit. We tried to play not only hard electric blues but punk, fake jazz, funk and rap. We were together for about three years.
DV: You continue to make original and uncompromising music today, often combining slide guitar and electronic effects with fractured rhythms. How does your music feed your visual art making and vice versa?
MD: I’ve been a musician since childhood. We always had a piano in the house, and music lessons were required from day one. I started playing the guitar when I was around eight years old. I was in garage and surf bands with my brothers in grade school, and then during high school in folk, rock and blues bands. I try to keep whatever I’m involved with musically a little primitive, very clean and simple, but I don’t know if my art really informs it that much. The things I’m interested in doing with painting just don’t apply to my music. I have no problem with the formalist viewpoint: a separation of the arts may be a good thing.
DV: The paintings you are showing at MINUS SPACE were exhibited at Tony Shafrazi’s in 1987. What was going on in the art world at the time you made these? How do you think this body of work related to Neo-Geo or other painting trends going on in New York at the time? Can you tell us about when and where they were made and how you arrived at this particular look?
MD: Well, by 1981 or ‘82 it was pretty clear to anyone living in the East Village that we were in the midst of some sort of art boom. Condo’s career took off, and by 1984 he was selling out shows with Pat Hearn, who we both knew from Boston. Soon after, he moved to Europe, where he enjoyed even greater success. Things were happening really fast, at least for him and many, many others. As for me, it was difficult making contacts, meeting artists who did the sort of work I was interested in. I visited André Emmerich Gallery (which is where I thought I belonged) frequently, always with slides in tow, though I never had the nerve to show them to anyone. Finally, at an East Village exhibition, I saw a red monochrome painting by Olivier Mosset. It was tough and uncompromising, and it was one color. This I understood.
Olivier Mosset I introduced myself to Olivier, who then introduced me to Steven Parrino. I ended up sharing a studio space with Steven for seven years. Around the same time–1985 or 1986–I met Alan Uglow, Li Trincere, Max Gimblett and Barry X Ball. We did a fine group show at The Mission Gallery in the East Village. Soon after that I was in another group show with Olivier and Bill Beckley at Tony Shafrazi’s gallery. Tony offered me a two-person exhibition with James Nares the same year. As he was doing brisk sales with my work, I guess he felt comfortable enough to offer me the entire gallery. I had my first solo exhibition there in September 1987. While preparing for that show, I knew I would have to pull out all the stops, treat art like a full-time job. I was at the studio by 9 a.m. every day, building my own shaped canvases, working with enamel paints, fiberglass, stainless steel sheets and whatever scraps I could afford from the surplus shops on Canal Street. I started to experiment with surfaces, polishes and varnishes. I tried buffing and sanding different types of paint, but had trouble achieving the desired result. I wanted to make something that had a surface like a custom car, a surfboard, or a piece of lacquered furniture. I craved a California fetish finish, like a John McCracken sculpture, but I wanted it on a painting. It also had to be a shaped canvas that was informed by classic geometric painting. Most importantly, it could not look the least bit cynical. This was a tall order. My carpentry skills at the time were primitive at best, plus I had no real tools or workspace. I realized I needed to up the production level to get the results I envisioned. After a few weeks of material trials, I ended up finding the polymer resin material that restaurant and bar owners use to coat the tops of tables. It worked perfectly, drying to a sleek mirrored surface. I then found a good carpenter who could make the shapes exactly as I wanted, down to the smallest detail.
Mark Dagley, Work in process, 1987 I would plot the shapes out on graph paper, then make a small cardboard maquette. A few of the designs were anthropomorphic, but most were non-referential. Color decisions were sequential, sometimes random. I worked on the cardboard maquettes until the finished wooden structures returned from the carpenter. After finishing three or four of these works, I realized I needed quite a bit more space. I ended up subletting William Burrough’s Bunker on the Bowery from John Giorno during the summer of 1987 and was able to complete the entire exhibition there.
Mark Dagley, Studio view, The Bunker, 222 Bowery, August, 1987 DV: Op Art has been getting a lot of renewed interest and visibility lately. Recent museum and gallery exhibitions have thoroughly surveyed the movement, from its quasi-scientific origins in the 60s, through its Post-Structural deconstruction in the 80s, to its current incarnation. You participated in Post-Hypnotic, a 1999 traveling exhibition exploring the resurgence of optical effects in the work of an international group of artists. When did you begin using Op phenomena as a model for making new paintings? How does it continue to generate new work? MD: After the Shafrazi exhibition, I took a temporary studio in Cologne, Germany to prepare for an exhibition at the Hans Strelow Gallery in Düsseldorf. I painted stripes and dots on unprimed canvas, something I’d done a decade previously. I also started to make my own stretchers again.
Mark Dagley, No Title, 1989 I produced the dot paintings by standing on a ladder over the canvas, which was rolled out on the floor, and letting the thinned paint rain down on it: This produced an unintentional moiré effect. Though I found the results quite interesting, I never really pursued their implications, but I guess my involvement with Op Art started there. After working through a series of eccentric handmade shaped canvases and a group of torqued monochromes (which I exhibited in New York, at Stephanie Theodore Gallery, following a second show with Strelow), I attempted to locate areas of surface and support that had been overlooked in painting. I wasn’t terribly excited by the properties of paint, as were many of the abstract and geometric artists I met in Germany. I had developed more of an affinity with Blinky Palermo, BMPT, the Zero Group and Concrete Art.
Mark Dagley, Radical Structures The material qualities of the paint and its application became perfunctory for me. I really wanted that impersonal look, but, paradoxically, I wanted to achieve it painting by hand. Simultaneously–around 1990–I reduced my palette to red, yellow, blue, black and white. This was a little scary at first because, all the sudden, my work began to look like Mondrian knock-offs. But I could see ten or twenty paintings into the future, and I knew they’d never been done before, that this was unexplored territory. I called these works Primary Sequences, as they were comprised of just that: a 12-inch red square, placed next to a 6-inch yellow square, then, next to that, a 3-inch square of blue, and so on. This led to a whole series of paintings based on sequences and systems. But one thing I felt was missing, or discarded from the foundation of 20th-century geometric art, was classical perspective, so I also started doing one-point perspective line paintings in primary colors. I immediately noticed that they had an optical effect. They reminded me of Raymond Loewy’s Shell logo and the shopping mall supergraphics I grew up with.
Raymond Loewy In 1995, after completing dozens of single-point perspective line paintings, I turned my attention to the dead center of a square canvas. My Corcoran training came in handy here. I began tracing dots in pencil with a circle template, as one long, spiral string. I started with the smallest hole that a pencil point would fit into, figuring I’d trace dots up to 1.5 inches. I don’t think I ever got that far. It seemed that the drawing more or less made itself. After about a week, I had filled a 74 x 74 inch canvas completely. Then I painted the dots in: red, yellow, blue, red, yellow, blue… I knew from the start that there would have to be three of these paintings: one in primary colors, one in secondary, and one in black, white and gray. I still have to complete the one in secondary colors. Though they’re not difficult paintings to make, they’re extremely time-consuming. Funny, I never set out to make Op Art. As far as my work is concerned, I much prefer the term systematic painting. The opticality is just the sexy part, the by-product of the real issue at hand, which is structure.
DV: Lastly, tell us about Abaton Book Company, which you run with your wife Lauri Bortz.
MD: I had my own record label, Tweet, for a brief time during the early 80s, and Lauri ran an independent film company and a small theater troupe in the late 80s, early 90s. We met in 1994, through George Condo, and launched Abaton Book Company in 1997, with a volume of Lauri’s one-act plays. I’d always wanted to produce limited editions and artist books. Knowing so many interesting artists made it a natural move. We released a boxed set of twenty-five artist booklets called The Five and Dime, in celebration of the new millennium. Titles by Alix Lambert, Judith Fleishman, H.D. Martinez, Steven Parrino and me followed. We expanded Abaton, adding a record label in 1999, which features singer/songwriters Marianne Nowottny, Julia Vorontsova, and Corbi Wright; jazz chanteuse Devorah Day; Indian classical singer/musician Veena Sahasrabuddhe; punk bands Shell, The Girls and Fuzzy Wuz She. In 2003, we converted our garage into an art gallery, aptly titled Abaton Garage. We’ll be launching season five with a photo exhibition by Alix Lambert. There’s usually live music at Abaton Garage openings, mostly by artists on our label. And lots of food. Lauri always cooks up a storm.
Don Voisine is a Brooklyn-based painter and President of American Abstract Artists. Blinky Palermo, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf & Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germanyposted November 4th, 2007
Blinky Palermo, Red, Yellow and Blue, 1975 October 21, 2007 — January 20, 2008 The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen present the first comprehensive exhibition of Blinky Palermo’s work in Düsseldorf, Germany. Palermo came to Düsseldorf in 1962 in order to study at the Academy initially under Bruno Goller and then under Joseph Beuys. He developed his unmistakeable abstract pictorial language here and later in the USA (1973-1976) that decisively extended the concept of the picture and explored a new relationship between composition and space. Better Get Rational, by Dodie Bellamyposted January 1st, 2005
Last June I met my friend Margaret Crane for lunch at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. We sat outside on a sunny Sunday afternoon, chatting and eating salad. It wasn’t too hot, the air was breathable—a perfect ladies’ date. Then we headed into the museum’s jewel-in-the-crown exhibition, Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s-70s. The show was huge, astonishing, including nearly 200 works by 130+ artists from Europe, North America, and South America. Jesús Rafael Soto’s bright overlays of geometric lines made our eyes blur; Bridget Riley’s wavy stripes made us slightly dizzy. Lucio Fontana’s canvas was sliced, with two gaping wounds down the middle just begging to be poked, but we knew better. We saw paintings in irregular shapes by Manuel Espinosa, Juan Melé, and Rhod Rothfuss; we saw plastic, neon, dangerously sharp metal edges; we saw Mira Schendel’s sheets of rice paper hanging from a nylon cord, all fluttery like parrot tulips. Margaret and I marveled at François Morellet’s diamond-shaped metal grids that squished up and expanded. We stood in front of a three-dimensional painting that shifted almost imperceptibly. “Margaret, am I crazy or did you see that thing move, too?” We delighted in Gianni Colombo’s rows of throbbing styrofoam rectangles. With so many kinetic pieces, the stationary art felt dull, static—like it just sat there taking up space. A number of artists worked with corners, none of them as eerily as when Joseph Beuys stuffed the corners of his studio with animal fat, but we did enjoy Fred Sandback’s single blue elastic cord that created a square of (empty?) space in a white corner and Enrico Castellani’s “Red Corner Surface,” which looked like giant red buttocks. We saw paintings that curved away from the wall, paintings with things hanging from them; we saw mobiles, first-edition concrete poetry books, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photos of weird water towers, and Carl Andre’s shiny floor tiles that we could actually walk on without a guard hauling us away.
Lucio Fontana With a big show like this, it’s impossible to take it all in. After a while the mind shuts down and visceral reactions take over, greeting the work with grunts and chuckles, or sometimes just the word “cool.” This shift can be intense, as the boundary between viewer and artwork falls away—you enter into a sense of intimacy with the artist, the intimacy of a sort of psychic licking rather than studied analysis. This happened to me at the Eva Hesse retrospective at SFMOMA in 2002, where her work profoundly moved me; but surrounded by so much cleverness and glitz, her pieces in Beyond Geometry felt stripped of resonance. Eleanor Antin’s “Carving: A Traditional Sculpture” is comprised of four long horizontal columns of photos of Antin’s naked body—front, back, and side views—taken over time as Antin loses weight. In the context of all this formalism, it emerged more as an exercise in seriality than a comment on women and body image. Standing before it, Margaret said, “Cool.” The show’s press release touts the political influences on the work included. Under the subheading, “1945-1979: A Turbulent Time,” mention is made of the Cold War, Vietnam, civil rights, feminism, gay liberation, and “an activist youth culture.” In comparison, the exhibition catalogue (MIT Press, 2004) focuses more on the theoretical than on the political implications of this transitional period between high modernism and postmodernism, when the United States overthrew the shackles of European dominance and became a world-class art power. Though many of the artists in the show practiced a fervent regionalism, curator Lynn Zelevansky argues in her introductory catalogue essay that these works’ “radically simplified form and systematic strategies” comprise a global movement. “The international artists represented in exhibitions and publications around 1970 may have already been aware of one another’s work to varying degrees, but it is more significant that they shared sources and ideas to which they had been exposed locally. As a result, the conceptual basis of their art, often independently conceived, was nonetheless related.”
Bridget Riley Throughout her catalogue essay, Zelevansky argues with artist after artist. Discussing the American minimalists’ disdain for European art, Zelevansky notes that the minimalist embrace of the literal in art was actually a tenet of European concrete art, formulated way back in 1930 by Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. In response to the minimalists’ disdain for what they saw as Mondrian’s “geometric abstraction,” Zelevansky points out that Mondrian, in fact, created his work intuitively. In response to Swiss artist Max Bill’s assumption that “seeing is detached and rational, a straightforward biological mechanism that functions the same way in all people,” Zelevansky counters with, “As James Elkins makes clear, true seeing is actually ‘irrational, inconsistent, and undependable.’” One comes away from the Beyond Geometry catalogue swimming with information, one’s head stuffed with a vision of insular groups infighting and denouncing each other over rigorous issues such as “ideal” versus “presence.” Zelevansky’s typology of beliefs and oppositions is exhausting—minimalist, concrete, neoconcrete, Grupo Ruptura, conceptual, kinetic, and on and on—a big sense of no forest, all trees. What I longed for in the catalogue was a clearer and more in-depth exploration of what the exhibition’s press release describes as the “common intellectual and artistic concerns” that form the basis for “this unprecedented coming together.” How does this work emerge from its “turbulent time” other than with a vague sense that because of the threat of nuclear holocaust we’d better get rational? At the beginning of Zelevansky’s essay is a photo of Hélio Oiticica’s Nucleus 6, which is made up of a group of monochrome pinkish paintings suspended at various heights, some of them at right angles to the others, creating a sort of enclosure. In the midst of them stands a guy in jeans and a short-sleeved black shirt, his arms down and slightly out from his body. We see him only from the shoulders down; the top half of his body is occluded by two horizontal paintings. Another long vertical painting wedged at a right angle between these two horizontal paintings appears to slice into and bisect his body in two, separating the left side of his chest from the right. The absolute stillness and stiffness of his stance reinforces this effect. There is a thin gap between two of the paintings, revealing a strip of the guy’s face—the hint of an eye and the corner of a mouth. He’s peering back at the viewer, but his expression is unreadable, ambiguous, as if he were rehearsing for a part in a Robbe-Grillet film. He doesn’t look like he has moved beyond geometry. He looks like geometry has trapped him.
Jesús Rafael Soto In high school when I was a pulsing blob of emotion and intensity, László Moholy-Nagy’s 1947 Vision in Motion was my bible. Documenting the aesthetics of Chicago’s neo-Bauhaus Institute of Design, which Moholy-Nagy founded, the book is liberally illustrated with student and faculty experiments in form, as well as contemporary avant-garde art. I marveled at the streamlined angularity of art and industrial objects, at curvaceous biomorphic shapes that hinted at a titillating eroticism. Beyond Geometry’s catalogue credits Moholy-Nagy several times with being a precursor to some of the artists in the show, so I turned to Vision in Motion again, curious as to how it could speak so deeply to a Vietnam-era working-class teen in Indiana. What I found was an astute, frighteningly timely analysis of the dehumanizing effects of modern technology and global capitalism. In the wake of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Moholy-Nagy proposes a marriage of art and science in order to secure the heart and morality of the industrial world. Moholy-Nagy cites the US Declaration of Independence as an example of a utopian principle whose realization is limited by “the unconscious dependence upon the previous structure.” New forms of art can eradicate oppressive unconscious structures. “The fundamental concept and concern of the abstract painter does not seem to be involved in the details of ‘social reality.’ Consequently, abstract art is often interpreted by the social revolutionaries as the art of the escapists. But the artist’s duty is not to be always in opposition. He may concentrate his forces on the central problem of visually constituting a better world, yet to be born. . . . In a deeper sense, the interpretation of space-time with light and color is a truly revolutionary act.” “Abstract” art, by reprogramming the subconscious of the masses, will bring about nothing less than a new social order. Vanguard art such as that in the Beyond Geometry exhibition has spurred us to appreciate increased viewer participation in the creation of the artistic experience. This work, committed to explorations of duration and seriality, an embrace of mathematics, suggests that (all?) meaning should reside in the object rather than the artist pointing to meaning outside the object. These are laudable aims, as are the erasure of the authority of the artist as creator, the prizing of process over product, and the urge to eradicate artistic categories. In the big picture, we can vaguely see artists all over the world working towards a leveling, possibly democratic, way of making art. But where is Moholy-Nagy’s revolutionary fervor? In the catalogue’s final essay, “Reality Rush: Shifts of Form, 1965-1968,” Inés Katzenstein makes explicit connections between Vietnam-era activism and developments in the art of Daniel Buren (French), David Lamelas (Argentinian), Hélio Oiticica (Brazilian), and America’s own Robert Smithson. Katzenstein provides a lively, enlightening analysis of the heroic efforts of these artists to break free of the confines of the gallery and take their formal experiments to the streets. How this work engages its “turbulent time” feels especially pertinent to our current political climate, as 9/11 and the war in Iraq have propelled many writers and artists into a crisis of aesthetics. How can art address the enormity of such terror and chaos? Should it? Does formal experimentalism still make sense? Gay writers and artists experienced a similar crisis in the ’80s and ’90s in response to AIDS. I’ve been struck by the lack of irony in gay experimental narrative as compared to its straight counterparts—the McSweeney’s crowd, for example—and I’ve wondered if gay writers’ confrontations with AIDS aren’t, in part, responsible for that. Is irony possible in the face of mass crisis? Beyond Geometry may not have provided answers to my personal aesthetic soul-searching, but it did amuse Margaret and me. Perhaps laughter and delight are enough for two serious ladies on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Dodie Bellamy’s latest books are Pink Stream (Suspect Thoughts Press) and the re-release of The Letters of Mina Harker (University of Wisconsin Press). She lives in San Francisco. This article was originally published in NYFA Quarterly, the arts and culture magazine of the New York Foundation for the Arts. Interview with Linda Francis, by Matthew Delegetposted December 1st, 2004
The following interview was published on MINUS SPACE in December 2004 in conjunction with Linda Francis’ spotlight exhibition.
Matthew Deleget: I would like to begin our interview with a brief discussion of your background. You were born and raised in New York City (The Bronx). What was you first contact with the arts? Was visual art something that was understood and supported?
Linda Francis: At the time, one could get a decent education in public schools because there was still a social contract between government and the individual. Arts programs were not much in evidence though, but I do remember that my inattention very often landed me in the art room.
MD: You came of age during the mid sixties. What made you decide to study at Hunter College? Was your focus always on art?
LF: I didn’t go directly into college from high school. I really had no idea of what to do with my life. Finally, when I did go, I intended to major in the sciences, specifically biology and chemistry. I went to Hunter simply because it was a good school and free. I was able to work a couple of days a week to get by. One depressing New York City winter evening, I passed an art supply store on my way home. It was all lit up and somehow I thought to try to make a painting. Really it was like being hit by lightning. It seemed as though I had been looking hard at things all my life and didn’t know it. I transferred to the art department, which was run by Gene Goossen. A relatively small group of artists were teaching. I was so fortunate to have been there then — it was a wonderful time for the faculty. They were developing their ideas and beginning to exhibit them. The excitement was palpable. During that time Tony Smith had his first big show of sculpture in Bryant Park and MOMA mounted an exhibition called The Art of The Real curated by Goossens.
MD: You did your MA at Hunter where you studied with Tony Smith, among others. How did he teach? What were his major concerns in the classroom? How did he impact your development (or not)? What did you leave with?
LF: The program was small and intense. The same people taught undergraduate and graduate classes. I continued on to the graduate school because of Tony. My memories were generally of a one-to-one dialogue when he came around to my studio. We talked and talked, mostly about science. We always discussed the latest issue of Scientific American since we both regularly read it. Smith was kicking around mapping ideas like the ‘four color’ problem. For him there was no better way to engage the issue of flatness in painting. He had worked with Buckminster Fuller and was very involved with his ideas. We read D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, which proved to be the book that probably had the most lasting influence on my thinking. At the time, I was painting sort of sci-fi looking things with color arrayed as that seen through a prism. Tony used to tease me saying that I didn’t want to paint, I wanted to make magic. A few of us would often go out to Donohues bar after school hours and continue our discussions into the night. At some point Tony would open his beloved dog-eared copy of Ulysses and read aloud. After I graduated, I remember dropping in to visit him at Hunter one night. I tried to enter the room with the least possible disturbance as class was underway, but he spotted me. Tony turned around and fixed me with his profound stare, said something to the effect that he was glad to see me, and commenced reading Ulysses to the class for the rest of the hour.
MD: Who else at Hunter left an impression on you – faculty, etc.?
LF: Ray Parker, who had the sharpest eye for composition and detail in a painting. Lyman Kipp, an utter iconoclast. Bob Morris whose work could be understood by the assignments he gave in class. Ron Gorchov, Vinnie Longo, Ursula Meyer. I was never in Doug Ohlson’s class, but we became friends. I remember watching him hang his first show at Fischbach one night with Jane Kaufman and Tony looking on. I also have a memory of Twyla Tharp trying out a very beginning work performed for a small group of us at Hunter. It featured her husband, painter Bob Huot, a decidedly non-dancer. I took every class Leo Steinberg gave. Each lecture was an object of pure beauty.
MD: Who were some of the artists that you admired during this time. Were there any specific exhibitions or events that left an impact on your thinking and process?
LF: At the time there were allot of ‘happenings’.The idea of ‘performance’ was being developed along with improvisational dance. It was as though painting had relinquished some of its theater and became more a secret, alchemical process. There was a very amazing evening at the Armory with (I think) Kaprow, Rauschenberg, Morris, and Rainer. I was very interested in Cage’s ideas too and remember making a poster for a concert by him in Town Hall. I was reading Causality and Chance in Modern Physics by David Bohm and Louis DeBroglie. To me it was metaphysics. I loved contemporary music and did some performance myself in Town Hall and later at the University of New Hampshire with composer Gregory Reeve. To his Red Gongs scored for orchestra and two percussion sections, I made an immense blacklight painting on mylar with a brush wired for sound. Thinking about music led me to make some boxes that radiated light and some that radiated smoke. It was as if all absolutes gave way to the experimental. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty perversely fueled the perception that anything was possible. It was also a time when a strong humanistic sense prevailed. I remember being part of the March on Washington for Civil Rights and some time later part of the Art Workers’ Coalition, an artists’ movement in support of peace and democratic ideals. Some of the artists whose work I looked at with interest then were Matta, Lee Bontecou, Larry Poons, Jasper Johns, and Arakawa.
MD: After graduating from Hunter, you lived in Tribeca (downtown Manhattan) during the 1970s and 1980s. Tell me about the artists you hung around with and the places you frequented. Where did you go to see challenging work?
LF: It was a real community. Tribeca wasn’t “Tribeca”. Mostly everyone knew each other. Everyone went to each other’s studios, always visited, stopped in the street to talk, went to have a beer. There were many empty spaces, in Soho as well, and people used them to mount ad hoc shows, have events. The Tribeca milieu sort of resisted commerce. There were very few galleries in Soho then and none further downtown. Holly Solomon and Paula Cooper were first in Soho, I think. Bob Kushner and Tommy Schmidt were friends who were showing with Holly. Food restaurant was going strong. I remember seeing a performance by Joseph Beuys at Rene Block’s space. John Weber, Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend opened at some point. Mel Bochner was doing wall paintings then. I remember he was the first artist I asked to come over to my studio to formally look at work. Walker’s was a basic burger bar which often took work in exchange for a tab. The Delphi known affectionately as “the Greek’s” was the one place where everyone met when a real dinner was needed. Brad Davis and Daisy Youngblood lived in my building. The door to my loft said “American Ballbearing Co.” Across the street was Suzie Harris and Gene Highstein, Keith Sonnier. Within a radius of a few blocks were David Reed, Judy Rifka, Richard Nonas, Susan Rothenberg, Ronnie Bladen, and many, many terrific artists. I saw Jon and Joanne Hendricks. There were Fluxus things going on. 105 Hudson Street was an office building with rooms that people started to use for exhibitions. I remember seeing a Louise Bourgeois sculpture there. She was relatively unknown then. Some time later The Dia Foundation bought the building and converted it for use by their artists. Hal Bromm opened a gallery in his loft on Beech Street, which he later moved to Chambers Street. The collectors Milton Brutten and Helen Herrick were often there. Hal did some terrific shows and put together many artists. It was there that I first met critics Tiffany Bell, Carrie Rickey and poet David Shapiro. Creative Time began a series of summer installations called Art on the Beach on the landfill, which extended the west side into the Hudson River.
MD: Between 1976 and 1980, you had 5 solo exhibitions and participated in several group shows at Hal Bromm Gallery. What issues concerned you at the time, arts-related or not?
LF: Hal’s gallery was a big part of the art scene in Tribeca. It was really an extension of the neighborhood and reflected its character. He showed many European artists too and did really nice group shows with all of us. All were involved with the abstract. My first show at Hal’s in 1976 was works on paper. One wall of 60 x 45 inch drawings, geometric structures using crayon on vellum, and on the opposite wall, brush drawings, which I did to relieve my wrist between crayon drawings. At the time I found mechanical ideas like Sol Lewitt’s art by proxy drawing interesting, but the pronouncement that ’painting was dead’ for the millionth time bored me. The work I liked had an eye for ‘phenomena’ as opposed to the programmatic exclusivities of the Minimalists. Transparency of process was important to me, as I guess it was with them, but, for me, it was only about understanding. I was particularly wary of the ’signature’ styles that were everywhere in evidence in Minimal art. It seemed to me that there was a great deal of work, which was defeated by its own program. I thought this work had the style of meaning, but very little intrinsic meaning. I was not opposed to style as a subject, but the Warhol direction was not for me. I admired Bob Grosvenor’s work. He seemed to me to be one of a very few who was capable of engaging his materials in a totally poetic, but rigorous way. We met when I showed in Paris in 1978 at Gislain Mollet-Vieville et J. P. Najar at the same time that he was showing at Eric Fabre. During that time we also met Yve Alain Bois who was editing the critical magazine Macula with Jean Clay. I was in Paris in 1977 too as the guest of Jean Paul Najar. I met many of the young French artists, but especially remember painter Christian Bonnefoi who took me over to Gallerie Jean Chauvelin to see a fantastic show of Russian Constructivist art. We went afterwards to the Chauvelin’s country house where we met the painter Martin Barre.
MD: During 1977 and 1978, you participated in two group exhibitions and a solo show at P.S.1, one of the first spaces in the country exclusively showing contemporary art and a defining force in the alternative space movement. What was happening there at the time of your exhibitions? What projects did you realize there?
LF: P.S.1 was a wonderful old brick and sandstone building in very bad condition. Alana Heiss had a marvelous vision for the place and it began functioning as soon as the doors were able to be open. The most successful works in the beginning were those that somehow dealt with the wrecked walls and the crumbling spaces. Most of the spaces were school rooms. In keeping with that, I mounted certain papers on the wall, the blackboard, and asked four painters to do something with them. I collaborated with poet Stephen Paul Miller. I had a painting in a large exhibition called simply A Painting Show. It was one of the first shows in the newly fabricated gallery space. The exhibition brought together most of the abstract painters working downtown at the time. There was a companion exhibition A Sculpture Show.
MD: In 1980 you designed some sets for “Harrisburg Mon Amour” by David Shapiro and Stephen Paul Miller with Taylor Mead at The Kitchen in New York. How did you get involved with this project?
LF: I went out by bus to Kutztown a few times with Stephen Paul Miller to make a print with him at James Carroll’s project space at the college. We met John Cage there who was making a print too. We all contributed to his print — my contribution was a coffee cup ring. The bus route ended up in Harrisburg, the site of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster. Recording one of their bus trips to the college, Stephen and David used the distant reactor stacks at Harrisburg as a counterweight to their two-hour conversation about anything and everything. Taylor performed the verbatim script. He read on until sense was overwhelmed by inanity and began throwing unread pages away in exasperation. Taylor was the perfect tragic comic. Laurie Anderson did the music. I made some very large backcloths with giant atomic bugs on them. The whole thing was a kind of hapless shriek.
MD: In 1981 you participated in the exhibition “Drawing Distinctions, American Drawing of the Seventies,” which originated at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen and traveled throughout Europe. How did this show come about? How did the show’s curator, Alfred Kren, define what was distinctive about Americans drawing? Who else was included in the show? What was the response?
LF: I met Alfred at Hal’s. It was in 1977 during a group show called Moving. I was doing a big drawing on the gallery wall that changed over time and required me to do successive overlays at night when no one was in the gallery. Unbeknownst to me, Alfred, newly arrived from Germany, was staying there and watched me do the large free-hand arc. He loved drawing. It united information and painting. It was taking up more and more space in the canon. In Europe it was still mostly seen as studies or notes, although there were some terrific exceptions in the work of Francois Morellet, Henri Michaux, and Norwegian artist Jan Groth. Some of the artists in the drawing show were Artschwager, Borofsky, Grosvenor, Le Va, Lundberg, Sandback, Shapiro, Sonnier, and Tuttle. There was a very good essay by Carter Ratcliff in the catalog. Drawing is by its nature more intimate and I think Alfred was looking for the definition of self in them. Yet these works were independent of other objects. They were complete and self-referential in the same way as is painting or sculpture. His view was not encyclopedic, although it encompassed a plurality of ideas. He saw the common underlying imperatives. He was interested in my work for the way in which it positioned the “given” against the “interpreted.” In 1979, I made a breakthrough to the subjects and methods that continue in my work now. I began making work that took information — photographs of galaxies and nebulae — and attempted to recreate the images by using analogous processes. The goal was knowledge. The press in the countries to which the show traveled were interested in Alfred’s thesis. The German press was somewhat skeptical though for a number of reasons, but I think largely because there was a growing consciousness that contemporary “German“ art was driven by different realities than contemporary “American” art. The curators at the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich were very excited by the show, however, and made that very plain to me when I was there. I really liked meeting Arnulf Rainer there too and was impressed by his comments.
MD: Your work has been shown quite a bit in Europe, primarily in France and Denmark, but also in Germany, Switzerland, Norway, and Italy. Do you think the kind of work you make is better understood there than here in the United States? What do you perceive are the differences?
LF: Perhaps not better understood, just better valued. But abstract art is more significant to Europeans. They see it as a lasting language, after all it was invented there. Perhaps it is viewed less as a material enterprise. I don’t really know. Here it’s much like jazz and blues. That is to say, it’s the giant in the room that one sees when one is able to get enough distance.
MD: Let shift our discussion now to talking about your work – where it comes from and how you make it. Your work over the past 25 years has stemmed from a personal dialogue with science, particularly the laws of physics and astronomy. How did you initially arrive at this subject?
LF: I always was interested in the sciences. There is great beauty in the ideas and concepts about the physical world. Sometimes I see them as rational metaphors for the irrational. It is probably not possible for me to be involved in society in a more obvious way. I don’t admire it all that much.
MD: Every article or review I’ve read about your work tries to either prove or disprove your use of science, how your work is a manifestation of science or how it is not. Do you employ a scientific process in the studio –i.e., hypothesis, experimentation, and conclusion? Do you welcome this ongoing critical discussion of your work?
LF: I suppose the way in which I work admits to what one might call conjecture. For example, I ask myself questions like this — if everything is made out of atoms and atoms are always moving then what would a stable form look like? Or more precisely, how could a stable form arise? My working method is a kind of experimentation. That is, I limit the variables in the work so I can see if some transformation occurs as a result of my operations. As for science, per se, I am most obviously not a scientist and feel happy when I am able to understand the things that I try to read. My work is really intuition even though I think that it pertains to some of the ideas in cosmology, string theory and the like. In 1982, I did a show in Copenhagen of very large drawings, in which I attempted to pick out the structures embedded in certain spiral galaxies. I called the show The Order of Chaos mostly because I thought it funny that the word ‘chaos’ is defined as ‘disorder’. I had been reading Pirogine’s description of chaos, which really pointed out how orderly it is. Predictability is a different case.
MD: Have you had the opportunity in the past to show and discuss your work with actual scientists, not just artists and writers. How have they responded to your work? How has their response differed?
LF: I have not spoken enough to the scientists with whom I imagine I would like to have a conversation. I’ve been shy about it, but would love to have the opportunity. My work does have an admirer in a German biologist though who can understand the work from the standpoint of what he sees through an electron microscope. Many years ago, in a fit of illumination, I phoned the string theorist Abhay Ashtekar and went on about baseballs and motion in all directions at once. He just nicely asked me to send him some pictures, which, of course, I was then too embarrassed to do. There have been a couple of very positive responses from mathematicians who are familiar with the arts and are able to decode my quirky relationship to numbers and space. I felt particularly good when one of them recognized ‘the three body problem’ in a drawing.
MD: Are there other sides to your work or process that are deliberate and obvious to you that viewers rarely or never pick up on?
LF: I think one would have to know or understand the possibilities to which I am alluding in order to know or get pleasure out of seeing the impossibilities that come up in the work. Yve-Alain Bois is the one person who has talked about that aspect of it.
MD: Supersymmetry – a concept straight out of physics – is probably the best point of entry into your working process. Dealer Nicholas Davies described it clearest in relation to your work stating “every fundamental particle of matter possesses a ‘shadow’ particle, as yet unobserved, which holds a force, and vice versa.” Your work exemplifies the principals of matter and force. Please explain.
LF: When I first started using chalk and eraser in the seventies, I thought of the chalk as matter and the eraser as force. I understood that the way to account for form or mass was to look at force. The character of the form depends upon the type of force exerted upon it. That is how I was able to make chaotic patterns by moving around chalk with eraser in certain curved trajectories. Supersymmetry is a two-paneled painting, in which I tried to show how the same structure might look quite different depending upon what elements were visible in each case. That is actually an idea which informs most of my work.
MD: The appearance of your work can vacillate between the macrocosmic and the subatomic simultaneously. How important are these shifts in perception, these exponential shifts in scale?
LF: They are very important and I fully intend them.
MD: You’ve consistently used a geometric vocabulary in your work – aggregations of circles, ellipses, triangulations, quatrefoils, and pentagons, as well as arcs, waves, and spirals. Straight(ish) lines haven’t made an appearance in your work in the last 25 years, except in the rectilinear edges of your papers or panels. Tell me about the shapes, structures, and systems you use.
LF: The structures that I use come out of motion in curved space and the idea that every point on a curve is the same point. You can sort of see the possibility for time travel when you look at a spiral galaxy and see the arms propelled symmetrically from the center, but corkscrewed in opposite directions. From the time that I first looked at a photo of the great nebula in Andromeda, I knew that symmetry and curved space were what I wanted to explore. I understood that three dimensions were a kind of brain trick to enable us to orient our bodies in space and to be able to move through it. At the same time, I was aware that everything depends upon how we decode information — that flatness in painting is not any more real than three-dimensional constructs are. I remember looking at a Ryman and thinking that it didn’t matter if the three little screws on the surface were dots or holes or photographs, or whether one was looking at a painting that took pains to be read as a wall on a wall and actually was seeing, of necessity, windows. ‘Flatness’ for its own sake was not interesting. Those things, which add an element of psychological dilemma to reason, interest me. One thing I have been doing for the last ten years is equating a line drawn anywhere on a sphere with an edge or silhouette. The painting Pentagon is a good example of that. Also, Two Hexagons. This idea started with some drawings I showed in 1997 that came from thinking about the wobble of the earth in orbit and wondering whether one could actually translate that into a “flat” drawing. I did that in the drawing Equatorial Precession and a number of others. That was one of the drawings reproduced in Michael Brennan’s review of the show on Artnet.com.
MD: Smearing and erasing play a central role in your vocabulary as well. To me, they signal motion, vibration, resonance, or flux. Is this the reading you intend?
LF: Yes, but that is, however, the by-product of making and unmaking form.
MD: Do you see your work as entropic?
LF: No. That is, not as in the classical definition of entropy.
MD: Do you see your work as ironic or pessimistic?
LF: Absolutely not.
MD: Your drawings are almost always chalk on paper and are large in scale. Do you make preparatory studies for your drawings? How do you make a drawing?
LF: It would defeat my purpose to make studies. Really the drawings are a crap shoot. I most often don’t know what structure will come up. That is why I set limits in advance — a grid of spheres or circles for example. And then anything at all can happen.
MD: What role does the white paper ground play in the equation with science?
LF: A continuum. Or a convention — a piece of paper I can use to show you something.
MD: Although your works are largely black and white, you sometimes use specific key colors, such as red and blue. What are your concerns regarding color?
LF: Matisse said that you can tell a colorist by their use of black and white. It has been hard to see a use for color because my interest, for the most part, is in the structure. It seems that most color is either too naturalistic or too decorative. I use color when I think I can unite it with the structure, or when it can function as black or gray, or when I need to differentiate some part as one would with a word.
MD: Recently, you began making paintings again. Your paintings are exclusively oil on panel, which is undoubtedly a much slower process than your drawings. How do your paintings relate to your drawings, or not? What do they share in common? How are they different?
LF: I guess the activity of painting as opposed to drawing causes me to work differently. I am very aware of the architecture of the panels, the orientation of the horizontals and verticals in relation to external architecture, the palpability of the paint, the objecthood of the whole enterprise. I use a lot of diamonds because the oblique edge confounds conventional gravity-oriented space and seems to posit an endlessness. I like to play with their measurements against those of squares. I make a lot of what could be read as diagrams. The structures I paint take into account the same givens as in the drawings and are, I hope, shown to the same net effect. Certainly the conclusions are the same.
MD: Your work, in general, seems to lie almost outside the realm of space/time, frozen snapshots of a cosmic continuum. In this respect, your work is a rigorous depiction of reality. Of course, not based on what we see, but rather based on what we know is true, proven through scientific inquiry. Do you think it’s fair to interpret your work as representational — yes, in the traditional sense, albeit from a completely different perspective?
LF: I remember once telling a realist that I was a realist too, if that is what you mean. But I was just joking. As in relationship to the idea of verisimilitude, it would be nice.
MD: Another interesting interpretation of your work was included in the review of your solo exhibition at Condeso/Lawler Gallery in 1997. Painter/writer Michael Brennan wrote “these drawings are elemental, not Minimal, nor reductive, and they function at the building block level of knowledge…they are constructed outside of any conventional rectilinear idea of art.” How does your work belong to art? How does it belong to science? Are issues of aesthetics part of your thinking, or not? Can scientific information be aesthetic?
LF: I was elated when I read that review. It was what I had hoped for in the work and was grateful that someone could perceive it that way and describe it so clearly. I don’t really know how the work belongs to art or science. I think of aesthetics — yes. But the best thing anyone can say to me is that the work is elegant. Perhaps in aesthetics that’s bad, but in science that is beautiful.
MD: I would like to talk to you for a moment about your solo exhibition – “Linda Francis: quanta” – currently on view at the University of Alabama, which features a lot of your recent work. How did you structure the show? Which works did you include in it? What ideas were you trying to convey? How did you arrive at the title?
LF: Quanta are units or parts. I like to think the work does some quantifying. I suggested that we choose work that pointed up the relationship between the paintings and drawings. I’ve actually never had the opportunity to do that before because I work from a whole a priori conception that generates lots of simultaneous forms and ideas. I don’t think linearly. I’ve noticed anyway that the idea of a ’series,’ which stems from Newman’s work, is often perverted to justify a commercial design exercise. There were seven paintings in the show and ten drawings. We started with some work from 1997 and included work from almost each year up to 2004. Most of the older work had been shown in NYC, but three paintings and five drawings had never been shown before. |
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