How important to you is the actual landscape you depict?

I’m more interested in the painting problems than the descriptive aspect.

Is landscape a metaphor for what is happening in the painting process?

It’s a pretext.

No different to a still-life object then?

It’s better than a still-life because there’s much more movement in there. In fact if you make it too static it’ll no longer feel like a landscape. I suppose I care much more about a landscape than I wish to let on. But I’m also terribly aware that landscape as a genre has been debased over the last fifty years so that there is very little possibility of doing something that has, say, an ideological, religious or nationalistic meaning, all of which were apropos in the nineteenth century. At this point the only meaning I can really assign to it is painterly. It’s still a wonderful tradition in art; there are so many good examples of how to do it right that you can still get very excited over it. And of course, if you’re not excited about going out into nature you’re not alive. The two of them have to meet somewhere. I try to make them meet in my painting.

Did your boyhood in Germany expose you to a special sense of landscape and nature?

And how!  The Germans have this thing about nature, woods especially, which is deeply embedded in the culture. I grew up with that. Every weekend we’d take what is called an Ausflug, a trip to the country. It’s part of my tradition.

Yet at the same time don’t you feel that the German romantic sense of landscape is historically tainted with nationalistic overtones?

German landscape painting never interested me. All the fuss over Caspar David Friedrich seems to be misplaced. As paintings I don’t think they’re very interesting. The guy with his frock coat and big hat standing in front of a scene with his arms outstretched: all that rhetoric gets on my nerves. I like to take things for granted. To inflate things with rhetoric is wrong. All you have to do is put down two colors and you’re way past all rhetoric, if you’re doing it right.

That’s quite a formalist position.

Well, I’m a formalist painter. I’m a student of Hans Hofmann, and probably a rather faithful one. I’ve never really found any reason to ditch any of his ideas, which I still find perfectly useful. They were well thought-out and profound. I don’t think what’s around today is in any way superior.

But did Hofmann tolerate landscape painting?

Sure. He did it himself, until he was fifty years old. There are paintings he did in Provincetown in Summer 1946 that are very recognizable landscapes.

But wasn’t there a sense under his tutelage that the future of art lay in abstraction?

A great thing about Hofmann is that he never thought in large categories. He dealt with the job at hand. What ever you were interested in, he’d tell you to try and do it as well as you could. Someone asked him if they should take a course in anatomy and Hofmann said “If you need it in your painting, of course”. Ideologically he had no axes to grind, except he wanted his students to understand that there is a mainstream in art, and not to hew too far away from it.

I’m still not convinced that landscape is just expedient. There must be some very deep draw, as you’ve spent the best part of your career doing it.

The deepest draw is, I know how to do it. You do what you can. I always drew well. Early in my career I tried everything: I wanted to be the kind of artist, like Van Gogh or Cézanne, who could paint anything, subsuming it under one’s own style. I did landscapes, figures, portraits, still lifes, interiors. But it turned out the only theme where I really had something personal, a sense of freedom and the possibility of growth, was landscape.

Landscape in itself entails freedom and growth.

To me it does. First of all, of all the kinds of representational subject matter, it encourages you to feel the most cavalier about description. If you need an extra branch on a tree, add an extra branch. If you’re painting a figure you’d end up with a three-legged person that way. I don’t like upsetting the apple cart. From the point of view of keeping your painting flexible and allowing all possibilities to emerge, I think landscape is the best. What I have to say in landscape comes out of my love of color, and my love of paint.

You studied with Hofmann, you have a love of color and of paint for its own sake, and you’re drawn to a subject that offers the most liberty and flexibility. It begs the question: why is landscape more conducive to you than abstraction?

I never wanted to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I always liked to draw; I’ve drawn representationally all my life, and I’m very good at it. It seemed to me that to jettison that was going too far. I admire De Kooning, who could draw like an angel but nevertheless threw it over, but he was at a moment in history when abstraction was a conquest; at this point it no longer is. It’s more a conquest to keep landscape going.

Is there anyone else around right now who you’d rate as a landscape painter?

Rackstraw Downes, Wayne Thiebaud, Frank Auerbach, Anselm Kiefer, Alex Katz. That’s just off the top of my head. I’m not a good man for lists. If I sat down I could probably come up with fifty people whose hand I’d gladly shake.

There is an interesting point of comparison between yourself and Alex Katz, who you mention. He’s a painter with obvious affinities with an American realist tradition who nonetheless had the ambition to paint on the same terms as the New York School. Was that your situation too?

I’m not ambitious in the way Alex is. One of my gods is Bonnard, and he was a fuss-pot. I love the idea that you can go over the thing again and again, go back into it, then let go.

Do you believe in the autonomy of color, that it can exist quite independently of the objects it describes?

I don’t think Bonnard every subscribed to that. I think he liked the idea of taking a color to an extreme position, but always gaining permission from some visual experience.

And you do the same?

Yes. I’m trying very hard not to be arbitrary. I think the more daring you are as a colorist the less right you have to be arbitrary. You have to take your public with you.

The public?

General sensibility. You can’t be doing things just because you feel like doing them, there’s got to be some sort of justification. I think it comes from the color parameters set within the picture. I try to stretch them, but at the same time I have to respect them. If you are any kind of colorist you know that somewhere behind all this there’s a kind of reason.

I’m surprised you mention the public, or “general sensibility”. Do you feel their presence when you paint?

No, but I’m happy to feel that they exist as a result of my painting, because I’m a very popular painter. I must be talking to somebody about something.

Are you anxious to preserve your popularity?

No. I’ve certainly spent many more years not being popular. I’m rather surprised by it, and it would be churlish not to be pleased by it.

It’s refreshing, and surprisingly, to hear a professional painter speak as candidly as you do about popularity and general sensibility.

I don’t like to think of myself as being “the other”. There are many artists who derive great comfort from being the other. In general I’m a friendly person, I’m gregarious, I wish the world well, I’m happy that my painting elicits enthusiasm.

The paintings certainly don’t convey any existential angst or inner turmoil.

When I’m painting, all I am is an eye. Feelings have very little influence, except in so far as they regard my original sensibility.

Mark-making and gesture, do they come from the eye or feelings?

I suppose feelings, but to be conscious of where they are coming from is not going to help anything. It would make you unnecessarily self-conscious.

In a painting like In a Breeze, there are some quite vehement marks.

Vehemence comes about because I want everything to exist as strongly as it can. I don’t want to hold back, I want to use myself up.

You say the heightened color in your painting can’t be completely improvised, that there has to be some credibility, yet it’s synthetic color, it doesn’t strictly speaking arise from observation, does it?

It has to have some correspondence. If it’s all imagined color that doesn’t feel like there’s an organic unity to it, then I’m not doing it right. It’s got to be justifiable in viewable terms. I’m not just doing it in order to make bright colors. I have a lot of followers who think that’s what my painting is about, but it’s not, it’s about color harmonies. I’ve done great paintings without any bright color in them at all. Look at Fog Bank Out There for instance.

It’s quite colorful for a gray painting, although it’s quite gray for a Wolf Kahn.

Well let’s face it, reticence isn’t my forte.

You generally want to paint good weather, is that fair?

No. Here’s a pastel of a thunder storm. When I was on the water I saw it, but there was still some sunlight hitting the trees. I saw the yellow of the trees against the black of the clouds and thought that was rather wonderful. It gave me permission to make something rather dramatic. Unless I’d had the visual experience I wouldn’t have felt justified in doing it. I made a little pastel on the spot which didn’t have nearly that much contrast. When you work on site you end up being more austere than you need to be.

More empirical, perhaps?

Yes, that too.

What percentage of the works you exhibit are made wholly in the landscape?

Twenty per cent. And then another forty per cent are made directly from drawings done in the landscape.

Should an educated eye, other than your own, be able to establish on the evidence of the work which belong in each category?

I hope not. The ideal is to make very daring, bright, courageous paintings outside, but usually one doesn’t because there is too much going on, and nature does enforce a certain austerity. Oftentimes you see the full implication of something only when you are back in the studio.

I love the fact that you use the word “austerity” where others might say “fidelity”.

I don’t know what fidelity means. Fidelity to what?

To what you see.

Is “what you see” what the camera sees, is it a series of objects that can be listed like things in a Sears-Roebuck catalog that happen to be thrown together, is it just an atmosphere?  It doesn’t mean anything, fidelity, until it’s filtered through a sensibility. The only fidelity that means anything to me is fidelity to my own highest aspirations – to be very pretentious for once! I value the possibility of development. I want each painting to be a step towards the next painting.

Is that to avoid mannerism?

Mannerism would be death. I have one thing that’s in my favor in this regard: I get bored very quickly. As soon as I’ve done things a few times I don’t want to do them any more. I certainly don’t want to become a manufacturer of Wolf Kahns.

You came of age as a painter during the high watermark of abstract expressionism, yet you owe more to Impressionism.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, I don’t know. The main thing is that I don’t want to force the issue on anything. My motto is “follow the brush”. If the brush ends up with Impressionism then so be it.

You paint American landscapes, and you paint within the tradition of American landscape.

I love Innes, Ryder, Blakelock, and the more modern American landscapists, Sheeler, sometimes Georgia O’Keefe, Burchfield, all these people are dear friends of mine.

What about Marsden Hartley and Milton Avery?

Avery more than Hartley. Hartley is a very uneven painter. I knew Avery very well and even went out painting with him. He was a wonderful guy. I don’t think about him when I’m painting, though. I think about Cézanne quite a lot, and De Kooning. I’d like to be as athletic as De Kooning – though I’m not, as you can see. I think about people that I’m not.

To gear you on to be something else or to comfort you for being what you are?

I don’t need comfort. I’ve made my peace with myself. But one needs brothers in arms. The feeling that other people have been similarly occupied.

Your paintings of barns have an archetypal American feel to them. Did they suggest themselves to you as a great form, or did they have some historic or symbolic resonance?

At one point I claimed that they are like a Greek Temple to us Americans, but now I think I painted them more for formal reasons. They are great shapes, very present, very unfussy, always planted in a very interesting way into the landscape, with one entrance high for the feed, one low for the animals.

Fog Bank is the kind of subject you might get in Hopper or Avery, but Avery at least would be much more concerned with the actual form of the sea.

The shapes you mean?  I’m just as concerned with the shapes as they are, but in a different way. Avery and Hopper were working in a modernist idiom at a time when that was a tremendous conquest. At this point its commonplace, so I don’t have to think about a lot of the things that they had to. Instead I think about tiny color gradations, small modulations that give me pleasure. Going from pink through all sorts of colors to that blue down there.

You can’t be oblivious to the fact that you are concerned with retinal pleasure, ultimately with beauty, at a time when those values seem very suspect in the artworld.

Such considerations are uninteresting because they don’t help me with my work, and who knows, next year the whole thing might change. We’re talking about matters of taste that have nothing to do with eternal values.

But surely at any historic moment there are going to be some painters who have a sense of moving the language forward and others who enjoy a contentment which allows them to take great delectation within the terms that are set.

I probably belong more within the second category. I work within my limitations. You can’t force yourself to be more original than you are; at the same time, you can develop your normal proclivities and make the most of them. I’m not smugly sitting back and looking at my work and saying, Gee, isn’t it beautiful?  That’s not my style at all. I worry about it just as much as anybody. I think about just the problems you raised earlier: What excuse is there for making landscape paintings at this moment in history when there is no real ideology to back it up. And yet, people love it and I love to do it. Maybe that’s enough. Who knows?  Then again, maybe the fact that it is problematical shows in my paintings. My attitude when I’m working on them is questioning all the time.

But answering lots of minute questions, rather than the big one.

I hate big questions, it’s not my nature at all.

But you seem to like big painting [looking at a large work in progress].

No, I don’t like big paintings. I’m doing this because I have a brand new big studio. I’ve had that same painting in the same space for the last three years. Every now and then I wipe my brushes on it. I haven’t taken it to any conclusions. My favorite size is 36×52 (inches). That’s where I feel most comfortable. Any yet I know sometimes that I can do things on a larger scale that the smaller works won’t allow me.

It is interesting to see a painting on the easel which is in process. How long have you been working on that?

Probably about five hours.

What we see is half a dozen or so trees in a space which will probably be filled by several dozen.

Certainly there’ll be the hint of even more. Eventually I’ll want it to be a full painting, filled with happening.

There’s already a lot of energy at this early stage, the way that orange shows against the purple.

You start off with something that’s going to get you going. I start out with strong relations. I can always tone them down. It’s very difficult to start with something toned down and then work it up to something outrageous.

The eye can become so acclimatized to brilliant, shocking contrasts of color within your work, pinks against yellows, oranges against purples, that when we get nursery colors, the pale green of your grass for instance, the effect is quite exquisite.

That’s a nice word. I’m not trying to be exquisite, but if one is one shouldn’t sniff at it.

It sounds like you are making conscious formal decisions at every stage.

All the time. I don’t make a stroke that isn’t a conscious decision. Except when I’ve got enough paint on the picture that I can go strip-strap [gestures] just in order to open up the space a bit, just take a cutter and go across, and not worry too much about where it lands.

The placement of the trees, was that a slow act of deliberation?

Eventually it’s going to be subject to a lot of second thought. The initial placement is based on the idea of division, going back and coming out again.

You enjoy creating a sense of pictorial depth, don’t you?  In that sense you are rather anti-modernist.

If I have pictorial depth it’s a fault because I really would like the painting to appear flat. I want everything to come back to the surface.

But you do create perspectives, don’t you?

You can’t help it.

I mean you avoid stylized ways of achieving flatness.

I don’t know how. Have you seen me do stylized paintings which achieve flatness?

No, but I’ve seen Van Gogh do it.

Well, he was a great artist who could do anything. I have a very different space to Van Gogh.

Isn’t yours more traditional?  Closer to an Albertian sense of the picture as a window onto reality?

I’d like to think not but maybe it is. To me it’s all marks on a surface. One luxury an artist doesn’t have is to look at his pictures objectively. Let me see if I have something that’s not Albertian. The thing that started me off with this painting (The Lagoon at Martha’s Vineyard) was that all of a sudden I had the idea that the horizon isn’t really a straight line at all, but that it recedes at an angle, and I thought that’s worth exploring, and I think I got away with it.

It gives a naivete, and tension, to the composition. It’s interesting that it arises from something you observed in nature.

I observed that, and I observed those blotches on the water which have to do with the sunrise.

Those blotches really go against the pictorial logic; the shapes, the drawing of them, pull one up short. A quality I respond to in your work is this sense of having your cake and eating it, of there being credibly pictorial depth and at the same time an equality of the picture surface. Your teacher Hofmann had that expression he was so fond of, “Push-Pull”.

I still think of that every now and then, but differently, as a way of just not letting the eye get stuck.

Wherever the eye is, there’s something next to it which is pulling in a different direction.

You are never allowed to lose the dynamism. When it’s finally done, though, I want everything to look very natural. I love that statement by Mallarmé, that the condition to which every work of art aspires is that of having made itself.

This painting (A Path Through Green) shows you at your most reductive in terms of composition, although the eye is given a lot to do with subtleties of tone. There’s a central blue shape…

It is supposed to be trees, that is what I thought. What I tried to do here is make a sort of generalized landscape with no particular incident to distract one, but still make a place where you could be.

There’s a slight sense of the effects one gets in a Rothko here.

I’ve said on some occasions, with a certain amount of snideness, that my aim is to do Rothko again, after nature (paraphrasing what Cézanne said about himself and Poussin).

And how about Pollock? There’s tremendous surface tension and agitation in a work like this one (Deciduous) it really pulls everything to the surface. It also de-centers the picture, doesn’t it?

Right now that is what I am trying very hard to do, to paint an all-over landscape in which there is no hierarchy. It’s very difficult to do. I was brought up and educated in a particularly hierarchical environment. It’s one reason why American painting is so interesting: it’s fought those battles. Pollock is someone I think about a lot, but at the same time I’m not only working on that one idea. It’s difficult to paint a Pollock at the Ocean.

Or Rothko in the forest. You mentioned Caspar David Friedrich. You just need a monk here…

The fact that the monk isn’t there means a lot.

But wasn’t it the achievement of Rothko to internalize the monk?  So that either the painter or the viewer is the monk?

That’s the part of Rothko I would disassociate myself from, his pretentiousness. One of my favorite painters is Morandi, because he made modest claims and made them stick, whereas Rothko (and Barnett Newman) made exaggerated claims which didn’t always stick. I try not to make large claim but I know that I’m a healthy painter. The virtues that I try represent are things we could have more of without any great harm to the body politic: enthusiasm, consideration, delicacy, subtlety, nuance.

The post “To Do Rothko Again, After Nature”: Wolf Kahn in conversation with David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

Three summers ago, a precocious Bronx Science high school Sophomore, Oona Zlamany, interviewed Leonardo Drew in his Brooklyn studio on video for artcritical. Zlamany was able to draw on familiarity with the artist as she had grown up with him as a close family friend. Now an undergraduate at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, our interviewer has shed some puppy fat but little of her youthful verve, and Drew gives as good as he gets, explaining the motives and working practices underlining both his Madison Square Park commission, where the interview takes place, and his current spectacular solo exhibition at Galerie Lelong, his debut with that Chelsea venue. In acknowledgement of the 2016 exchange, this interview is billed by Zlamany as “Part Two”.

Leonardo Drew: City in the Grass at Madison Square Park, June 3 to December 15, 2019
Leonardo Drew at Galerie Lelong, May 16 to August 2, 2019

Oona Zlamany Calls on Leonardo Drew (June 2016)

The post Invader of Space: Leonardo Drew on his Madison Square Park commission and debut show at Galerie Lelong appeared first on artcritical.

In writing about the exhibition, I could have played very happily on my own in the domestic spaces of Niles’ paintings. However, I was intrigued by the relationship that Niles has to the people he paints and the pseudo-autobiographical content of the scenes. I felt this could be another lens in which to view work already rich in narrative and pictorial content.

Perhaps Niles’ greatest feat with this show was pinpointing emotional, psychological dynamics in and between the figures. As humans, we are wired to diagnose these dynamics and then situate ourselves within them. As we meet the eyes of the various figures in the room, we become part of their web of relationships, which can be off putting at times and also deeply affecting.

VIRGINIA WAGNER
Was there a first piece that started the series, that sparked it for you?

ARCMANORO NILES
The last show I did was all outdoor scenes. It was a tour of my neighborhood and the people in it. There was also a little tiny still life of a kitchen with nobody in it. And I just remembered thinking, ‘Oh, I never went inside the house!’ Then I started thinking about who was in there, thinking about different spaces in the house where I could walk in on people reflecting on their life. And from there, I painted my grandfather in the kitchen.

Can you tell me how you go about putting the paintings together?

Everything that is orange is the ground. It’s acrylic. You see these red lines here? That’s the drawing and that’s everywhere. It’s the second step. And in that red, I do the values.

Like a grisaille. You studied traditional painting at the Academy?

I did study this indirect type of painting.

And by indirect you mean…

Layering. Mixing optically. Painting it in different stages. Going back and painting a color and seeing how the color on top interacts with what’s underneath. Direct is mixing all of the colors on the palette. You always do a mixture of both but I lean more heavily towards indirect painting because each part is built in steps. And I like each step to be visible at the end. I put the texture on with a roller. And, after that, I cover the whole painting in gloss medium before using oil. It seals the glitter but also it makes everything smooth again. And then when I get to the skin there’s a subtle difference in texture to help with the space.

Did you use the same method and colors of oil paints for all the skin colors?

Yes. So even on the blue ground it’s all the same colors. Throughout school, I was always dissatisfied with my skin tones. I felt that there was a lot more color in darker flesh that I wasn’t pulling out. I don’t know if it was from an old photo, but I was going to make this painting and I was like, ‘Oh it looks orange, so what if I make the ground orange and paint it with the bright colors that I see in the skin and then go back and glaze it with brown.’ But I just never went back and glazed it. After that, I decided not to use any neutrals in my palette.

When I think about paint I think about it as built on oppositions — thin and thick, texture no texture, light and dark, cool and warm.

That’s how you get tension and resonance.

I also think about how quickly the light comes back to your eye. The acrylic is a lot more opaque and dry with less layers, so the light comes back to your eye quicker because there’s not much there. The skin is done in oil. It has to go through the red, through the yellow, through all the different colors, and then it comes back a little slower, and that’s what gives it the shine.

I would say glow more than shine. The acrylic has a reflective shine. The body seems to keep its light within it. It has a golden quality. Where do you see yourself in the work? That’s you in the painting, right?

Yes, a lot of them are me. I’m around and easy to work with as a model.

But how do you orient yourself to the figures of you?

A lot of this is stuff that I’ve experienced and am recreating. Or it’s something someone’s told me and I’m like, ‘What did that feel like?’ and I try to put myself in that space.

It’s almost like you’re casting yourself.

I think I used to want to be an actor. Or, I don’t think I did. I did when I was a kid.

Me too. I teach this class called the Bestiary about illuminated manuscripts and animal stories and we look at marginalia. All the things that monks drew on the edge, which are often tiny lude creatures– copulating animals, nuns lifting up their skirts, a tree growing genitals. Your little gremlins remind me of those.

I call them Seekers. I first started putting this Egyptian fertility sculpture – basically an orgy scene — in my paintings. I wanted the regular figures to be vulnerable and interacting with each other and whoever’s looking at the painting but then the other creatures, the Seekers, to be impulsive. Whatever’s going to make them happy in the moment, that’s what they’re going to do.

I was thinking about how (when I was young) my mom would always say never go too far from the porch and I felt that these other things were influencing her decisions. And also thinking about how sex and violence started to influence things that I did.

Kind of creeping in from the edges of your life?

Yeah. I would do things, but really it was more about this other thing. Even if I didn’t realize. I’d be up at night thinking, why did I do that?

It is a simple idea in some ways and yet as complex as anyone’s relationship with the invisible things that haunt us. The Seekers are so well integrated into the composition that they don’t actually look as strange as they are. At first, we don’t even question them. And then we’re disturbed that we didn’t.

And sometimes people don’t even see them, which I think is kind of cool.

I think they’d be happy not to be seen; they have their own agenda. And they probably register subconsciously. They’re also agents of perverse sexuality. This one feels like he’s riding the other creature. This one is like when you cut a worm in half and the other half wiggles out and..

.. becomes its own thing. He’s always chasing that thing and I was thinking maybe it’s a part of himself that he lost and is trying to get back.

You are letting us in and being very generous with what you are showing us emotionally and pictorially and yet some of the figures look at us like, ‘What are you doing here?’

I did want them to feel like they are engaging you, inviting you. Even if they’re turning away – I wanted it to feel like they are choosing to do that.

So, there is some agency in the knowledge that they’re in a painting?

Yes. You’re walking into their space.

I’m really interested in the gaze in ‘Does a Broken Home Become a Broken Family.’ Is this your family?

Yeah it’s my mom and my sister, my nephew, and me. I was thinking about what happens when a family doesn’t grow up together, because I didn’t grow up with my sister. So I wanted them all to be separated from each other. They’re separated by the counter. I’m separated from them.

I know some artists struggle with how much to reveal about the dynamics of their own life and the people closest to them. Because often that’s the richest source material they have but the process of exposing it could make them vulnerable.

Oh, I don’t mind.

Do they mind?

I don’t think they mind. Also, it’s just a painting and they’re all just sort of standing around in the kitchen so it’s not unfamiliar.

They are and they aren’t. There are these wild sexual and violent Seekers dancing around them. It’s charged.

I’m actually a super private person. So maybe, here I’m not. This is my way of connecting to people.

I also feel implicated in this painting. Because if you’re the figure on the left and they’re not looking at you, then they must be looking at me. I’m grateful someone let me in the door, but I feel put on the spot. And I need to weave between Seekers shagging and those with knives in their hands just to enter the kitchen.

I want you to feel like you are walking into the space. That you are a part of it. That you are just late to the party.

The post Paper Heart: Arcmanoro Niles discusses his work with Virginia Wagner appeared first on artcritical.

3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York 12508, diaart.org

“You don’t see birds’ nests along here anymore and I used to find hundreds along the Hudson River. It really troubles me.” Dorothea Rockburne and I are driving from New York City on the Palisades Parkway north toward Beacon, when she points out the absence of songbirds, a critical indicator of intact woodlands. I’m watching how she looks out the window, looking at her eyes—transparent pools of turquoise and malachite, anchored by the sharpest pupils.

Absence, presence, retrieval of the natural world, and our relationship to the universe are the topics that we discuss over several visits from July, 2018 until our December excursion.  At Dia:Beacon, Rockburne will spend the day refining the final installation phase of her long-term exhibition, which opened last year with a presentation of the artist’s large-scale works from the late 1960s and early 1970s. In January, it reopens with newly added galleries, featuring works produced in the early 1970s through the early 1980s.

Dorothea Rockburne, organized by chief curator Courtney Martin, encompasses a body of work that is informed by the artist’s lifelong investigations of astronomy, dance movement, mathematics, Egyptian and Classical art, and architecture. Existing paintings and works on paper are juxtaposed with recreated works made by the artist, and with Dia staff under her rigorous direction. Guided by her work diaries from the 1970s and documentary images of the original works when they were shown at the Spoleto Festival in Italy and New York’s Bykert Gallery, the exhibition catalyzes a set of questions about our capacity to perceive light, space and form, and to “…develop an empathic recognition of the human condition that is the substance of art.

For several months, Rockburne commuted to Beacon to experiment with new materials that replaced the original, non-art, industrial substances. In the late 1960s working from a studio on Chambers Street with little money to buy expensive art supplies, the artist found at the hardware store crude oil, cup grease, and chipboard, materials that mimicked the earth pigments of Renaissance painting. Today, reimagining works that were never really made to last underscores how deeply Rockburne continues to interweave her knowledge of ancient art and modern dance.

Receiving her early education at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Montreal Museum School, Rockburne studied at Black Mountain College, moved to New York in the mid-1950s and waited tables while raising a daughter. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art she worked in the finance office while helping to catalog the collection of Egyptian antiquities. She later worked for Robert Rauschenberg, remaining deeply devoted to him as a friend for years. In 1960, she participated in the Judson Dance Theatre, working with pioneers Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and Lucinda Childs. The experimental vocabulary of dance that was being developed at Judson reconnected Rockburne with her growing up years in Quebec, and the athleticism she experienced in skiing and swimming. Her leitmotifs for the next two decades —the folding movements of the body and its engagement with gravity and space—were inspired by her joy in the activation of her own limbs in the domain of dance.

Today, the energy quickens in the cavernous yet inviting galleries of Dia:Beacon as Rockburne, self-directed and moving with steady power at 86, re-enters work mode. She is greeted by Heidie Giannotti, Dia’s director of exhibition design and installation, and her team as they discuss a checklist of final tasks to accomplish during the next several hours. The atmosphere is companionable, with an edge of intense concentration that feels like musicians tuning before performing a Bartók string quartet. A lot of decisions involving complicated processes have to be made in a short time frame, and these will depend upon how the new materials that have been painstakingly tested over the past several months respond to the humidity, light, and gravity. Like ancient Egyptian laborers who positioned the benben (the top stone of a pyramid), the strength and skill of Giannotti’s team is impressive. Everyone is invested in the project’s success, and Rockburne, who has developed precise (even poetic) instructions for the presentation/recreation of her works, appreciates their individual contribution.

Standing at the opposite end of a large gallery, Rockburne scrutinizes a group of four art handlers who are executing the placement of the components of Set (1970), a work that spans a huge wall. They gradually raise and lower an unwieldy rectangle of chipboard that will anchor a large sheet of ibis-colored white paper against the wall. Rockburne judges its placement, Giannotti looks at Rockburne, nods decisively, and everyone channels their effort so that the revealed vertical edges of the paper will curl just-so (for the love of Pythagorus, don’t tear!). Board, paper, and nails ultimately form a set of harmonious positive and negative shapes that visually interlock with the wall.

Classical Greek architects utilized entasis, a sophisticated geometry to correct for optical illusions or distortions in their temples, and Rockburne similarly adjusts her elements to solve the equation of perfection within her mind’s eye. “Set Theory,” the artist explains, “signifies the desire to classify group situations, both numerically and symbolically. The ancient Greeks were the first to value groups of things like people, angels, and numbers. But the German mathematician Georg Cantor articulated this as a mathematical form to describe this principle, in 1874.” Do not underestimate the mental repetition required to engrave remarks like this into this writer’s brain.

Tropical Tan (1967-68), a severely elegant polyptych at 94 by 144 inches, reveals the artist’s concerns with light, weight, and the potential for apparently unchanging materials to exist as liquids or solids. Four pig iron (black steel) panels were sprayed with wrinkle-finish paint to form a contiguous horizontal band across their centers, with exposed bands of steel along their upper and lower edges. Inspired by air ducts in the artist’s studio, each panel was crimped, forming a low-relief cross (visualize the Roman numeral for ten) within the bend. Depending upon the light and your position, the steel takes on a blue cast against the soft, chamois-gold of the paint color. This chromatic duet, along with the employment of geometry evokes the drapery of figures in Giotto’s divine Scrovegni Chapel frescoes at Padua, an important touchstone for the artist.

In Domain of the Variable (1972-2018), a multifaceted installation, there is a small V-shaped groove carved into the wall around its entire perimeter. The groove sits about waist-high, referencing a proportion in Egyptian art but also suggesting a miniature version of the negative space in Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk. It takes time to absorb each element of this installation but for me—a painter and gardener—the effect of a gelatinous substance called lithium-complex red grease (the color of pomegranate seeds) that has been applied to and absorbed into a length of that luminous paper is deeply moving.

Follow that Egyptian groove, turn the corner, and enter a room whose floor and walls are painted an almost blinding white. Drawing Which Makes Itself (1972-73) exists in a continuum of time. The dirt particles deposited by your footwear on this continent of white will accrue with those of previous and future visitors, satisfying Rockburne’s intention for its completion by your presence. On the walls are the artist’s corresponding carbon paper drawings, which were motivated by her desire to “investigate the geometry intrinsic to every sheet of paper.” Rockburne developed a process for folding the matte, deep blue paper and transferring its mark onto the wall. These drawings remind me of the tracery of prairie grasses against a field of winter snow. Rockburne mentions how much she loved the lines of the modified white parachute that Robert Rauschenberg wore on his back in Pelican (1963), his first performance piece.

At Black Mountain College in 1950, Rockburne studied with Max Dehn, a mathematician who came to the United States as a refugee of Nazi Germany. Teaching “mathematics for artists” Rockburne credits him with igniting her lifelong pursuit of math and her efforts to develop a language of visual equivalencies. It should be noted that Rockburne does not believe that viewers of her work must be learned experts in math, because the experience of the work is ultimately visual, emotional and physical. Nevertheless, Rockburne herself does the math, as I witnessed when she pulled out a stack of equation-packed math notebooks from her studio bookshelf. “This is what I did late at night when all the guys were out partying!”

In the Golden Section Paintings, and the Egyptian Paintings Rockburne prepared her surfaces with chalk ground and gesso. She sees, in the rigor of construction, an expression of the unchanging proportions of beauty described by the Golden Mean, articulated in the temples of Pythagoras, and in the timelessness of abstraction in painting. Unrelenting in her process of refinement, she understands the limitations that time imposes on her vision. “My idea of divinity is that I am in this form only temporarily.”

When Greece was the superpower of the Mediterranean, Pythias (the Oracle at Delphi) answered inquiries about everything from the timing of a farmer’s cultivation to shifts in political power and natural disasters. Delphi as a result became the most important and wealthy shrine in Greece. To me, another form of wealth is the capacity that we have to perceive, limb by limb and to retrieve, effort by effort, the secrets of our universe.

At dusk, we gather our belongings to leave Dia: Beacon. A flock of swallows flies past the clerestory windows, casting brief shadows against a wall. The squeal of a power drill cuts through from an adjacent gallery. A preparator is staging the space for the return of Andy Warhol’s monumental work Shadows (1978-79) after a long absence. Eye’s flashing, Dorothea Rockburne says: “Good timing.”

The post “The Substance of Art”: Dorothea Rockburne in Beacon appeared first on artcritical.

Born in France in 1946, Kirili  came of age amidst the beginnings of post-war French critical thought. The influence of Roland Barthes is particularly evident in the emphasis he has always placed in semiotics and their manifestation in the body. This had been his impetus to study Chinese calligraphy, Hebrew script and the iconography of global cultures. The embodiment of language as sensation and as a sensual experience is, according to Kirili, communicated through working with the hand. “It’s something I refuse to surrender, it’s in my DNA.”

I met with Kirilli in the Tribeca loft he has shared since 1980 with his wife, the artist Ariane Lopez-Huici. We are looking together at his new works on paper, massed on the wall flanking metal sculptures set against colored grounds. The organic lines in the paper pieces are open to multiple readings, as script, brushstroke or some other kind of signifier that references Kirili’s own sculptural forms. They exude confident improvisation. They also bring to mind the late cutouts by Matisse in the way color operates as light. Another ongoing new series functions equally on the wall or on the floor. These are elongated, vertical rectangles of several sheets of newspaper taped together and then intersected in the center by a thin, single “zip,” sliced, pinned, and draped from the center.  Placement, displacement, materiality and references to Barnett Newman reframe these ephemeral remnants from The New York Times. They are physically light, seemingly instantaneous and undulating with the slightest breeze.

ALAIN KIRILI
My life as an artist is an antidote to what I should have become. Kirili is a pseudonym. I left the conventional expectations of my family and chose to become an artist. The creative process for me has always been sacrosanct, I’ve devoted my life to it, and now it is how I stand up to the current negativity of my body. I have bone marrow cancer and am undergoing various treatments. I never know when one will succeed. I confront this negativity with the joy of creation, this is deeply ingrained in my identity. The illness is a new experience for me. Until now, my body has always been a great source of joy and inspiration.

MARY JONES
It’s no wonder that you’ve found a kindred spirit in the late work of Matisse, who having survived his successful surgery for cancer in 1941, felt he had been given a second life and consequently invented the cutouts.   

The new work is a good sign that I want to survive. So, I’m an heir of Matisse’s second life, because when I came out of the hospital I was starving to create, and to challenge any form of negativity. I’ve worked intensely to achieve a celebration of life in this new body of work.

We are now quite used to seeing a field or rectangle of painted color behind your large sculptural works. I’m reminded of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s theory about the “container and contained.” There’s an interplay between the painted space and the sculptural object. They seem at once to have emerged from that space but also to be extending from it or attached. At times the colored rectangle functions as a base or pedestal. The tension is closer here, as the contrast between materials has narrowed, the color relationships advance. Is this partly due to your renewed admiration for Matisse?

Yes, the fresh, direct perception of color and shape is very new in these works, and there is a specific link to Matisse, to his book “Jazz” and to the “Matisse Chapel,” the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, France. Ariane and I have attended mass there several times and it has always been very stimulating for me. Of course, I’ve admired the colors of the stained glass, but also the very rich collection of chasubles that he created. The young priest Father Paul Anel even did a mass in honor of Ariane and me wearing a striking chasuble. With that in mind, I’ve been studying the symbolism of colors in religious art in the well-known book by René Gilles, “Le symbolisme dans l’art religieux” (1961). It is crucial to understand that color in a church always has a profound symbolic dimension. I’m choosing and mixing beautiful, resonant colors with specific, ascribed spiritual attributes. There’s a dialectic between the formality and symbolism of the color and the organic aspect of the line, a powerful tension that I like to explore.

The “zips” of your newspaper pieces have a similar armature to the paintings of Barnett Newman, who was a formative influence for you. How do you feel the sensual and the spiritual are resolved in his work? 

The paintings of Newman are fire. Barnett Newman gave us one of the most beautiful titles for a work of art in the in 20th century art. “Vir Heroicus Sublimis.”  It means “Man,” but also “the phallus.”  The spiritual world of Newman is really burning with passion. I think of him as a source of white fire. His first sculptures, “Here I” (1950) and “Here II” (1965) were so important for me. I found them extraordinary. They were not anthropomorphic or architectonic. The only thing left was a presence. The quest for presence is something that has been with me from the beginning and I was happy to discover that in Newman. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with Tom Hess about him, and to discuss the Talmudic presence in Newman’s work. But I also have a great love and respect for de Kooning, in part because he made one of the most beautiful quotes imaginable, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.”  De Kooning and Newman stand very close to my heart and carry me, and I’d like to add something that I find very impressive, and that I feel is also very lovely. Barnett Newman did a show of “The Stations of the Cross” at the Guggenheim in 1966, and around the same time John Coltrane released “A Love Supreme.”  I’ve always loved to look at “The Stations of the Cross” in the Guggenheim catalog, listening to Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”

But there is another Abstract Expressionist artist who has been especially important to me, almost as if he was part of my family: David Smith. I admire his work and character for many reasons and one of them is that he was an artist born in Americawho confronted and forcefully challenged his Protestant heritage. He denounced it in many of his works, including a great one called “Puritan Landscape,” (1946).  He stood up to the Puritan traditions of this country and rose above the influences that could have destroyed or suppressed him. He protected himself by working with such dedication, making more than 500 pieces during his lifetime. I find this incredibly inspiring, and like David Smith I also take issue with all things Puritan!  This was an ongoing argument I had with Louise Bourgeois. We were friends and were very supportive of one another’s work. Although we had verticality and sexuality in common, we had completely opposite views about the Puritan attitudes in America. She loved it, and I hate it. I interviewed her for Arts Magazine [March 1989) and she told me, “Alain, you have too much empathy for the world. I love confrontation, I had a great crush on Alfred Barr, because he was a temple of Puritanism, absolutely inviolable, this challenge was part of the attraction.” So I said, “OK, Louise, I am not like you!”

You’ve studied Smith’s work extensively, visited and studied his library at Bolton Landing many times. You’ve also organized exhibitions and written about his work. But how do you see your essential differences?

A huge difference is that he is a master of the scrapyard. He had the ability to find old metal that he that he could transform through welding. There’s some blacksmithing and forging in his work, but mostly he could make and envision his work from this found raw material. Whereas in my work, I’m deeply concerned with the trace of the hand and blacksmithing. Let’s say, I’m much more of a blacksmith than David Smith. He was a welder. Today, people don’t know the beauty of blacksmithing. It is, for instance, crucial in African art and society. The blacksmith is highly respected. He is a central figure in the village, performing necessary tasks in both utilitarian and cultural ways. When I worked in Mali in 2003, I met a blacksmith among the Dogon and worked alongside him. We had a great experience together, built out of mutual respect.

Even your large metal sculptures have the directness of drawing. Your new pieces are created from drawing subtractively. Is this a new experience?

Actually, the process is almost like blacksmithing. The pleasure of blacksmithing is mysterious and sensual—to create a vibration on the surface of metal and then form a curve. It’s a way to introduce gracefulness, an expression of emotion through the marks of the hammer, or the power hammer. In my new work the signs and shapes are slightly trembling, like in blacksmithing, and like in life.

What’s trembling in blacksmithing?

The fact that you start with rigid line of metal and as you shape it, a trembling quality is created, one that takes away the rigidity.

Is there sound?  Is it percussive?

Oh, yes. You could almost shape it with the sound alone and with your eyes closed. If you beat the metal when it’s getting too cold, your ear is also getting too cold, and when it’s red hot, it’s a different sound. And that’s why a lot of music is born in blacksmithing, in the forge.  It’s very often the secret source of Flamenco.

In this new series, there’s certainly a rhythm you’ve created from piece to piece, and as a whole.

Each work can be by itself, but as an installation they become monumental through multiplicity. Monumentality has always been with me, and I’d like to show them in an environment that activates this potential fully. There’s also an “archeology” of my own work here. Recently, I did some corner pieces of an iron rod and a piece of newspaper on the floor that relate to clay pieces I did in the 1970. The recent sculpture utilizing newspaper on the floor and on the wall is revisiting some floor pieces in zinc from 1972. Wire and paper are traditionally used to give thickness to free standing sculpture before it disappears with the addition of clay or plaster.

Today for me, to show the use of paper and wire is a way to break the traditional hierarchy where only bronze is the final version of the sculpture. Now, paper and wire are revealed and are the final versions of my sculptures.

Monumentality can be thought of as imposing, formal and static, yet your work consistently involves movement, especially with the new paper pieces.

I’m concerned with movement, not stasis. My free-standing sculptures are tactile, fully indicative of the human movements that made them. That’s the beauty of sculpture, a free-standing work of art and that you can touch, and that has brought you something new, and to experience it fully you are compelled to move around it. Sculpture invites you to circumvolution. You are not just in front of a work of art, you turn around it, you dance around it, you have a spiritual experience enacting this very profound, performed movement that human beings need. In every religion in the world, whether church, temple, or a sculpture like a stupa, this movement is practiced. There is a fundamental sense or drive for circumvolution.

And speaking of movements, you and Ariane have recently become US citizens. How’s that going for you?

I first arrived in 1965 and traveled back and forth several times. In France, after the second world war, the art community was destroyed. So, it was great for me to meet artists here that were close to my age, like Mel Bochner, Robert Morris, Marcia Hafif, and to go with Robert Ryman to hear jazz. There was nothing better for me than to meet living artists. I admire them, have great empathy for the difficulties they face, and for the determination of contemporary artists. Life is short, it’s urgent.

I’ve been so moved to see women emerge in the artworld, people I originally met in the 80s, like Elizabeth Murray, who was a close friend. To belong to a community is important, and to be part of an open world where women are recognized has been wonderful. The “Me Too” movement of today is something that gives me so much satisfaction, and something I never expected. It’s signaling the end of patriarchal power. It’s a revolution and it’s great. To be married to an accomplished woman artist and see that we both can achieve recognition has been very gratifying. As Simone de Beauvoir said, “In a couple there should be room for two.”

I’m not afraid of the feminine or the emotional in art, I welcome it.  I’m completely in love with Italian art and I’ve gone to Italy at least 20 times. It’s my first destination. It’s absolutely stunning what the church has allowed on its walls regarding ecstasy, it interests me very much. The lightness of being is a crucial aspect of sculpture. We speak about weight. When does a woman experience weightlessness?  When she has a climax with God!  That’s exactly what the St. Teresa of Bernini is saying!  There are Hindu temples in India where you see carvings of beautiful bodies undulating, and you begin to understand that when you bring together sexuality and spirituality, you are in masterpiece mode.

The post Lightness of Being: Alain Kirili discusses his new work with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

KAREN E. JONES
You began this project well before the watershed #MeToo movement in which numerous powerful American men, particularly in the media and entertainment fields, have faced allegations and repercussions for sexual harassment and rape. Can you pinpoint the inspiration for addressing the topic in an exhibition? Have you found yourself framing the exhibition differently within the current cultural context?

MONIKA FABIJANSKA
The inspiration for the show came in December 2014 when Carolee Thea prepared a slide show of her artworks for me. Among them I saw Sabine Woman (1991) – a life-sized installation rendering a drastic gang rape scene. I remember coming back home wondering why I had never seen a work like that. Because I am particularly sensitive to censorship, I immediately thought that since I have not, there probably were other works by women about rape. I was right. But I could not guess what would become apparent within a mere couple of hours: a rudimentary internet search made it clear that the subject has been addressed by a majority of famous women artists, internationally. Its omnipresence meant that this would also be true for all women artists, whether more or less accomplished, and probably across time. I was stunned by the contrast between the number and quality of works about rape and almost complete absence of their discussion in literature.

Further development of my project was guided by people’s reactions to my interest in researching art on rape. At the beginning of 2015, they usually showed surprise, to put it diplomatically. Whether it was disgust or disbelief, it reassured me that the subject was worth inquiry. When I mentioned the idea of an exhibition, a common expectation was that it would be international and include artists from countries where “they rape,” like India. Such reactions made me aware of how strong the taboo was in the American society, and I decided that I had to make an American exhibition. The contrast between the silence around the subject and rape statistics was mirrored by the chasm between the silence of art exhibitions, art history and critique and the omnipresence of the subject in women’s art.

You have chosen 1968 as a starting point, and yet, the exhibition opens with Kathleen Gilje’s piece Susanna and the Elders, Restored with X-Ray that refers to Artemisia Gentileschi’s 1610 painting. Why bracket the subject within the last 50 years?

You would need a whole museum to give full justice to the subject. Yoko Ono’s 1968 film “RAPE” belongs to the earliest works on rape by contemporary women artists, and even predates them by a few years. The subject can easily be traced back to the early 1970s. It is more difficult to trace it before women gained broader access to the art world, and will probably be impossible to find more than a few artworks prior to the mid-19th century, except for works that used allegorical themes and were painted by the few women artists active then, like Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi (1610). Timoclea pushing the Thracian captain who raped her into a well by Elisabetta Sirani (1659) is more interesting as a type of representation and I would like to find historical works by women, at least drawings, representing rape realistically, and reactions to its impact on their psyche and sexuality. This, not “histories,” is the focus of works by contemporary women artists. I never intended to present the works chronologically within the exhibition, so Yoko Ono’s film does not open the display. Kathleen Gilje’s Susanna and the Elders, Restored (1998/2018) is the opening artwork because the exhibition is about iconography of rape, not about rape per se. It is not a selection of artworks on rape, which I found particularly compelling or formally interesting, but an attempt to analyze a representative sample of iconography of rape in women’s art. I marked this intention by opening the exhibition with a work that is a critique of the male iconography of rape in the history of art.

In your research, where did you identify the earliest representations of rape in both literature and visual culture?

I focused on how contemporary (mostly American) women artists represent the subject. At first, because rape is taboo, one might think that we have never talked or represented rape visually, but in the next moment the realization comes that rape is omnipresent in human culture, and therefore its descriptions and – to a lesser degree – visualizations. You find them wherever you look for the roots of our culture: in the Greek mythology, and in the Bible. In her book, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (NYC 1975) Susan Brownmiller argues that the biological possibility of rape is the basis of the socio-economic relations of men and women, and that a marriage contract, according to which a woman belongs to a man, was just a safer way to secure a woman from another man than her abduction. Abduction of Sabines is one of the founding myths of Rome!

But as “heroic” rape is present in the dominant historical narrative, that of mythology and holy scriptures, and created by men, its different image is preserved in fables which were told by women and meant to be cautionary tales, like Little Red Riding Hood which early versions can be traced to the 10th century. When it was eventually written down and published by men (Charles Perrault in the 17th century and Brothers Grimm in the 19th c.), the girl was stripped of agency and wit, and the concepts of guilt, punishment and a male savior (the hunter) appeared instead, not to mention that rape was no longer discussed openly but disguised as wolf eating the girl.

When it comes to visuals, I don’t know what representation can be called the earliest. The context for my exhibition are numerous representations in painting and sculpture, which were popular in Western classical painting from the Renaissance through the 19th and even 20th century: Abduction of the Sabines, Rape of Persephone, Rape of Europa, Zeus and Leda, Susana and the Elders. I guess cave paintings also show scenes of rape. But what would interest me would be scholarly research of early representations by women, besides the era of Gentileschi or Sirani. Looking at modern and contemporary art is extremely interesting, too. The earliest 20th century depiction of rape by a woman artist I know of is the exquisite 1907 engraving by Käthe Kollwitz. I am sure there are more. We were made to believe that rape is an isolated event, a rare crime, happening when we come home too late, in a skirt too short. Rape happens all the time and everywhere. Women’s knowledge of that fact and its sharing, including art on rape, has been censored by patriarchal society. As a result, it is hidden in plain sight.

Why did you select Susan Brownmiller’s term the “heroic rape” that locates the glamorization and justification of rape? You upend the term as your title. Can you unpack the term and discuss why you selected it?

Brownmiller’s “heroic rape” refers to “the direct connection between manhood, achievement, conquest, and rape.” In art, the male narrative of the conquest includes a dramatic struggle ending with romantic submission. Also, the focus on action is characteristic of the male perspective as shown in the history of literature and film. One does not have to look for historical representations to find it. A 2017 film Wind River, ironically distributed by the Weinstein Company (in October 2017 its producers cut relations with TWC), which seems progressive because it draws our attention to the atrocities happening on Indian reservations, shows the raped woman only twice: running through frozen fields and lying dead in a pool of blood during the captions, and during the rape scene reconstruction as part of explanation of what happened. It is not a film about rape of a woman. It is yet another film of a man in pursuit of another man; “a good man” chasing “a villain.”

What makes works by women radically different from those by men is the focus not on the action or drama, but on the lasting psychological devastation of the victim: her suffering, shame, silence, and loneliness. Upending Brownmiller’s term seemed right for the title of the exhibition, which was intended to show how women narrate the rape of women, and call attention to the history of rape misrepresentation in culture. The adjective “heroic” used by Brownmiller is descriptive in the context of historical representation of wars, but already contains more than a hint of sarcasm. I planned an exhibition analyzing iconography of women’s art and I needed to illuminate the counterpart: the existing and charted iconography created by men.

Why did you decide to focus on women artists and the US? Could you see the exhibition expanded to include international artists?

The exhibition was originally planned as international. The reactions of its potential audience made me limit its scope. I am referring to my conversations from the beginning of 2015, before the #metoo movement was formed. I realized that New Yorkers often thought rape occurred predominantly in some “peripheries,” whether geographical or social; it happened elsewhere, but not “here,” not “to us.” By that time I knew most of American women artists made a work on rape, and I also knew that one in six American women has been raped. I thought that addressing our society was crucial: what happens now and here, in Manhattan, in the Bronx, in Ohio. There was also a problem of representation. Based on what criteria would I choose international artists? India but why not Sri Lanka? A Swedish artist because Sweden has one of the highest rape statistics, but only because its definition of rape is truly broad? Such a project risked finger pointing unless it were huge in scope and truly representative of many cultures.

I am fully aware of the fact that not only women are raped and I refer to it in the catalog. Men are raped, too, and quite a few men told me their stories during my work on the exhibition. LGBT people are raped. One may also think of a separate project about sexual abuse of children. A responsible exhibition cannot be about everything. Men’s rape is much more of a cultural taboo than the rape of women, and it requires a separate scholarly research of its specificity. Same with rape of LGBT people. I did not curate an exhibition about rape in general but specifically focused on women’s art.

Could you discuss the various artistic strategies in the exhibition, as there’s a wide range of practices here. For example, the abstract sculptural works of both Sonya Kelliher-Combs and Senga Nengudi to the document-based conceptual work of Susanne Lacy’s Three Days in May? Was it a conscious decision to have various working methods represented?

In order to curate a representative survey of some twenty works capable of representing hundreds that I found, the curatorial selection takes into account the following five elements at the same time: 1) three generations of artists; 2) ethnic diversity (artists of American Indian, African American, and Asian origins, and Latinas); 3) all visual mediums (from drawing to social practice); 4) themes that inspired artists to address rape (from fairy tales to rape as a war crime); and 5) varied visual languages they chose (from symbolism to performative re-enactment).The exhibition also explores themes that inspired artists to treat rape, such as trauma, domestic violence, child abuse, media coverage of sensational cases, college rape culture, the role of social media, criminal trials and responsibility of public institutions, rape in the military, rape as a war crime, slavery, rape epidemic on Indian reservations, women trafficking, rape in public and political discourse, and visual and literary tradition, especially art history and fairy tales. Often, several themes inspire one artwork.

The Un-Heroic Act examines remarkably varied visual languages artists employed in order to evoke feelings as contrasting as empathy and shock. Some employ realism (Ada Trillo, Carolee Thea), others symbolism (Sonya Kelliher Combs, Angela Fraleigh), sometimes verging on abstraction (Senga Nengudi). Some aim for poetic beauty in opposition to the act itself, in an attempt not to victimize again (Roya Amigh, Angela Fraleigh). Some avoid depicting the female body altogether and use text instead (Guerrilla Girls, Andrea Bowers, Bang Geul Han, Guerrilla Girls BroadBand, to some extent Jenny Holzer), others contest classical iconography through subversive representation (Kathleen Gilje, Kara Walker, Natalie Frank, Roya Amigh), or complicate the relation between reality and fiction in para-documentary treatment (Yoko Ono, Lynn Hershman Leeson). Yet others employ performative re-enactment (Ana Mendieta, Jennifer Karady, Naima Ramos-Chapman), activism (Suzanne Lacy, Guerrilla Girls, Andrea Bowers, Guerrilla Girls BroadBand), or conceptual instruction works (Yoko Ono). The artistic language of expression does not follow any specific theme which provided inspiration. Rather, expression follows the artist’s intention: to shock, to remember, to meditate, to heal, to express anger and pain.

It seems that you situate rape as a symptom of violence against and oppression of women, whether the psychological harassment and invasion of personal space in Yoko Ono’s “RAPE,” the brutal performance in Ana Mendiata’s Untitled (Rape Scene) — based on an actual event — orthe trauma and aftermath addressed in Naima Ramos-Chapman’s film, And Nothing Happened.

Each of the works you mention represents its time, but also the artist’s intention and cultural experience. For example, even though both Mendieta’s and Ramos-Chapman employed re-performance, Mendieta decided to re-perform the harrowing scene of rape with an intention of shocking her audience (a set of photographs documenting a performance Rape Scene, 1973/2001), while Ramos-Chapman re-performs her living with and battling trauma, clearly with an intention to win, and to give example to other young women to speak out (a film And Nothing Happened, 2016). Rarely a millennial artist represents a vulnerable female body avoiding re-victimization. Naima Ramos-Chapman’s work expresses the voice of the generation that finally speaks about rape, female sexuality and psyche openly, and despite pain, asserts that voice.
Ono’s work is an exception in the exhibition because the artist most probably considered it a metaphor, where stalking a woman and a threat of rape were to portray abuse of power and tensions in contemporary world, from international relations in the era of Vietnam, to the artist’s own experience of being stalked by the media. Ono’s conceptual score for the film said that camera may also chase men. Nevertheless, “RAPE” is also a great work on abuse of women.

What has been the reception and discourse within the university community? And what kind of critical reception are you getting?

I am independent curator but I volunteered to guide many John Jay College student groups through the exhibition. The exhibition makes a strong impression on them. I received several letters from John Jay professors praising the exhibition and thanking me for both addressing the subject, and for selecting renowned artists and bringing their art to this community. They appreciated guided walks and gallery labels. I was told that the gallery had many more requests for tours of the exhibition than usually. It is important to mention that a majority of the John Jay student population does not have much interaction with art and they do not visit museums. They have professional knowledge though on many subjects covered by the exhibition, like domestic violence or trafficking women and the exhibition certainly opened their minds to new language of expression. The College of Criminal Justice has been a great venue for this exhibition.

The exhibition has, so far, been very favorably reviewed in the press. Jillian Steinhauer in The New York Times not only praised it but picked exactly what I wanted the audience to understand, through careful presentation of varied iconography: that rape has been a major subject for women artists. The review also emphasized the historical aspects of women’s art and of the subject of rape. I couldn’t dream of a review closer to my intentions for the exhibition. There were also excellent reviews in The Brooklyn Rail and Art Papers, as well as interviews in the Hyperallergic podcast and Bomb.

How do you see the discourse on rape expanded by activist practices such as the Guerrilla Girls artworks in the exhibition? Do you think that their practices affect change?

No ultimate goal of activism is ever achieved. Our lives, both in the singularity of our individual biographies, and our collective life, are woven of doing, not of having things done. No single exhibition or artwork can make a change. But together they do. As part of the project, Guerrilla Girls Broadband organized a workshop with John Jay students, which resulted in two anti-rape culture posters. In order to make them, students first needed to learn the language of expression based on facts. I observed them working on it, and it was obvious what an amazing experience it was for these young women. Once students posted them on the campus, they obviously received mixed reception and had to learn and practice the language to explain and defend their project.

If you think of Suzanne Lacy enormous projects involving thousands of people, they definitely bring change. Among her nine projects devoted to rape, Three Weeks in May (1977), documentation of which we show in the exhibition, was re-performed at the invitation of the Getty in 2012 and the comparison of its many elements, reception, and impact in 1977 and 2012 is telling. We will never eliminate rape but the City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Police Department and local media changed their attitude, developed the language to name rape, and mechanisms to fight it. It is impossible to prove what percentage of this change can be credited to Lacy’s project. But I strongly believe she had an impact. For example, as part of her 1977 project she organized a dinner for the City officers to discuss the language used in relation to rape. Three Weeks in May was one of the founding projects of social practice.

The post Regarding Rape: Monika Fabijanska discusses “The Un-Heroic Act” with Karen E. Jones appeared first on artcritical.

ELENA SISTO: You’ve scaled your work up and gone quite a bit more abstract in the imagery.

KATHY BUTTERLY: My new works are larger and it feels right. It actually feels great. My work has been evolving in this direction for a while. The larger ones are allowing me to speak more formally and allowing the materials to speak in ways that I feel communicate where I am now. I’m continuing the conversation/ideas that I have been interested in for many years: color, mass of color, line, mass of line. The materials themselves take on roles in the work, becoming the protagonists or antagonists within a piece. I still enjoy working on my smaller scale forms and they are shifting too. I really like the challenges they are bringing to me; they still reference the body while also becoming more abstract.

You’ll sometimes fire a piece many times, almost to the point of exhausting the glaze. Is that because you have a succinct image in your mind of what you are after in a piece, or are you are finding it step by step? Describe your process of revision and how you change your mind about what you want.

I fire a piece from 15-30 times, a few times up to forty. I have no idea what a piece will be about or look like beforehand; I “find” the piece by working on it. With each addition of glaze or clay I need to fire the piece in order to see what I’ve done. My process and world events equally influence the direction and meaning of my work.

I start by casting a form from a plaster mold that I’ve made from a store-bought form, so a readymade, and then manipulate the clay while it is still malleable until I see/feel something in it, sort of Rorschach-like. I may add some clay forms to it then start to refine the piece. I really love this part of the process. I carve the piece, smooth it until it feels alive and becomes like a three-dimensional line drawing. Next I’ll fire the piece, put some glaze on it, then fire again, take the piece out, decide on the next color or addition and fire again.

Many mistakes are made and many times the direction I thought I was going shifts according to the results I get. I look forward to making mistakes. They’re part of the process. They push the works forward. Mistakes are great because they create mysteries/problems for me to figure out and they often take me to a deeper place where I am willing to risk losing a piece in order to make it work for me.

The amazing work of George Ohr comes up often in the context of yours. Do you look at him?

George Ohr was a genius. He was a master of his material, a master of scale. He merged figuration and abstraction and that is something I am very interested in. If you give his work time, especially the unglazed ones, you may “enter” them and understand their architecture, the mindful directionality of the work and how, ultimately, they become huge, like a Richard Serra sculpture. You just need to allow yourself to go there.

What do you look to for inspiration? Do you listen to music, NPR (like so many artists), or play TV in your studio while you’re working?

I listen to WNYC, NPR, and when I get too depressed from listening to the news I’ll listen to music. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Courtney Barnett, Kurt Vile, Elliot Smith, Neil Young, and Ryan Adams are among my faves in the studio and I’ve also started to listen to podcasts like Sound and Vision.

Everything inspires me or at least I can say influences me, especially living in NYC and Maine. In terms of art, I’ve been looking and thinking a lot about how materials are used and how much empathy or power can be obtained from a brush stroke or a drawn line; the intentionality of a cut or a mark. Examples of this would be Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie and how much thought, weight and sense of direction went into each stroke; or Alice Neel and how much feeling she got out of one brush stroke or a drawn line; Antonella da Messina and how I feel he was sculpting his portraits with paint – just look at how he described a lip or an eye. I look at Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases and think how those probably would not have come into being had he not worked with clay beforehand and used a large fettling knife to cut through huge slabs of clay. So – how artists use their materials and get so much expression from them.

How important it is the acquisition of skill to you?

Skill is a big deal. Mastering something gives you options. It gives you freedom. When you have skill and knowledge of your materials your intuition can flow. You can take the work to where it wants to go.

Where did you study and with whom? Did being on the West Coast influence you at all?

I attended Moore College of Art in Philadelphia for undergrad and UC Davis for graduate school. At Moore I studied with Jack Thompson and Ken Vavrek where I was taught some important foundational skills for working with clay. At Davis I studied the closest with Robert Arneson. Other dynamic faculty were Wayne Thiebaud, David Hollowell, Manuel Neri, Squeak Carnwath, Mike Henderson and others. There was history at Davis and I was studying with the people who made it.

What I learned was that art was lived, it was a life style, it was your friends, it reflected the world, we all inspired each other. Of course I learned more skill, art history, etc. but it was the spirit of being an artist that probably left its mark most strongly on me.

Yes, California was influential on me and still is. I was being drawn there by the art, by the colors that were being used, how clay was being used in ways that were not traditional, not pottery – they were making art out of it. I first saw the work of Ken Price, Ron Nagle, Viola Frey, and Bob Arneson when I was at Moore College of Art. I had thought clay had no meaning- it was pottery-and they proved me wrong.

A visit by Viola Frey to Moore changed my life. At that time working with clay was not embraced by the art world the way it currently is. Viola made larger than life figurative sculptures that were equally painting and sculpture and they had meaning. I watched Viola womp down 25 lbs. of clay on the wheel and throw what was to be a large foot; this foot would be part of the base of one of her sculptures. She was a small woman who made work that was larger than life, powerful, political, and meaningful. She was a trailblazer, and she inspired me greatly.

Something that seems refreshing about working in clay is that it’s been with us for thousands of years, yet there seems to be less art theory involved than with sculpture. That may make it a more open space to work in. There’s great skill and technique involved but it’s a very empirical process. And it seems to me that you manage to elude both the more doctrinaire aspects of sculptural practice as well as the craftiness of ceramics.

Those are interesting observations. Yes. I find myself most comfortable not fittng in. This is a place for personal freedom. I don’t actively strive for this, its just who I am and the work reflects that.

When I first started out with clay I was also studying art history, painting, welding, etc. I felt a connection to clay and glaze and its potential. I also felt a strong connection to the vessel form. I learned what I needed to learn with clay and glaze to be able to make my work. I had no interest in learning how to make a pot or what temperature something was fired to. I just wanted the work to get fired to a state to where I could see the colors and the clay was hard. I’m interested in what my materials can do and how I can get to speak through them.

Many of your pieces stretch to reference an external system, object, order or artwork and then metamorphose or crumple into an intimate huddle–a pile up of attributes. (I can almost hear a whole range of sounds when looking at your work, like harrumphing, lip-smacking, quiet snorting, yawning, and dripping.) The pieces evidence psychic statthe collapse of an effort–or even a pretense–into a self-knowing and self-accepting humor and wellbeing. That brings to mind the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who had a concept he called “going on being.” He believed that in a healthy parent-child relationship, the child is allowed to develop within the benign attention of the parents and feels supported and safe in her investigations and challenges. This allows her to forge a sense of self-continuity, self-acceptance and awareness of her ability to accomplish things on her own. If the parent intrudes upon or curtails the child’s process it stops the child from “going on being” and forces them to react to the parent instead. Does that concept relate to what you feel you’re doing?

You nailed it! Yes, that’s a great way to explain how I work. I feel that while I am working on a piece, I am its enabler, I take it to where it needs to go, the psychic state which is a reflection of what I am feeling at the time.

There are also formal considerations that go into the works that help to reinforce the piece’s emotive qualities by either adding psychological strength or adding psychological disorder. An example of this is the quality of a line. A line can be confident by being bold, perfect, a solid color, or can be nervous or shy by being thin, wispy, jagged. So line is both a formal and an emotional aspect of the work. As one who works three dimensionally, I also consider line to be the outline of the form itself.

So when I look at one of my forms the first thing I see when I start is a three-dimensional line drawing. I consider it a perfect line. In my work I currently feel this need to have something absolutely beautiful and perfect in it so that I can allow myself to have chaos in it. I need a balance of grace and chaos in my work. Line allows this.

How important is color?

Color is very important to me. Like line, color can have personality and also works formally. I use color in many different ways. Over the years I’ve built up a strong relationship to color and how it can create meaning. Sometimes glaze is built up so thick on a piece that the color itself becomes a form, and many times a sort of protagonist or antagonist in a piece. I have built up an understanding of the qualities of color; it can be translucent, solid, dry, cracked, glossy, etc. This all adds to the dialogue and meaning. Colors also represent meaning in terms of association to things in the real world. I feel that I have relationships with colors as I am working on a piece. Just like I feel I need to enable a piece to develop, I need to enable a color to speak, have meaning, have form.

I think you have achieved a mastery of your medium. There’s a fairly sizeable cohort of women artists for the first time in history coming to the fore that have really achieved mastery. It’s an exciting phenomenon to witness, enjoy and benefit from. Do you feel this also?

Absolutely, and thank you. I love what I do. I love learning about my materials and this learning is not done by reading or watching what others do but by doing, by making, by making mistakes that then turn into knowledge and possibly add value to the conversation and become a tool. I’m a big fan of Sheila Hicks, Rachel Harrison, Charlene Von Heyl, Amy Sillman, Phyllida Barlow and so many others. And though Alice Neel and Joan Mitchell have been embraced by the art world for quite a while I feel there has been renewed interest and re-evaluation of the importance of their work. Alina Szapocznikow also comes to mind.

I agree about these artists, but for the sake of argument I would call Alice Neel and Joan Mitchell pioneers. I’m thinking of the cohort coming after them. There’s a real swelling of the ranks starting with women now in their late 60’s or their 70’s, like Katherine Bradford, Louise Fishman, Mary Heilmann, Judy Linhares, Melissa Meyer, Catherine Murphy, Dona Nelson, Joyce Pensato, Joan Snyder, Barbara Takenaga, and many more. Many of these women are associated in some way with feminism or at least are benefitting from the gains of feminism. Then the next wave of women gets even larger. Maybe because of the effects of feminism women are finding a real place to stand in the culture and have a lot to say – and new ways of saying it. It’s invigorating for everyone.

Yes, I and I would include you too. What all these women have in common is a command of material and a strong sense of self. I’m friends with many of these artists and can say that all have dedicated their lives to their work.

Thank you.

Speaking of Joyce Pensato, she has Giacometti in her DNA and he was the king of repetition within very narrow parameters. What is the importance of repetition to you?

I feel a connection to Joyce, taking the same form, Mickey, and using it over and over again as her “vessel”…..yes, I do feel a connection and an understanding of why she does it.

Is repetition a way of making a place and an identity for yourself? Could you say that if one didn’t repeat oneself their work would lack meaning, it’d just be permutation?

KB:I like the idea of place. Yes, it is a place- a personal space in my mind for thought. I think the word identity feels too self conscious for me, I guess identity comes out of it but its not the starting point. Artists who immediately come to mind, whose work is repetitious and whose work I admire, are Stanley Whitney and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Repetition of an idea is, in a way, the same as mastering your materials- you are ‘mastering’ a concept or trying to fully understand an idea or a feeling- you are searching. The more one works at it, understands it, gets lost in it, fails it, triumphs, and walks into the unknown the more one masters it and then ‘owns’ it.

The other thing I can say about repetition or limiting oneself to an idea is that it is actually not limiting! Same thing for materials. You keep pushing the boundaries and you go to deeper places. I guess one could think that by ‘limiting’ myself to only ceramic materials and to a vessel oriented form that I would be bored or repeat myself, but I actually find the opposite to be true. There are times in the studio when something feels too familiar so I sabotage it and then deal with it—sometimes coming out with a new color, texture, idea. I know that for me the artists whom I feel the deepest connection to are artists who are obsessed with an idea, are forever on the ‘search’ and have a deep connection to their materials.

To address the second question- I can’t say that lack of repetition equals lack of meaning. I think there are plenty of good artists who have the ability to work with varied materials, varied styles, and varied ideas and find meaning in their work. I think they have an idea and need to see it out in different ways; Fischli & Weiss and Picabia come to mind.

What about Alina Szapocznikow?

Her stuff is creepy and beautiful and amazing. I saw her show at MoMA a few years back. There was a lot of work and I wasn’t sure how much I liked it but it stuck with me and now I really like it, but probably in small doses.

There’s often a smile in your work. Literally an upwards-turning curve that creates an emotional lift.

Yes, lately that has been my “in” to the piece. Don’t know why, just going with it.

Sometimes the grin is hopeful and happy. Sometimes it’s sarcastic and sinister. Sometimes it’s an ambivalent and worried smile. I work with or against the smile. It’s always there whether I cover it up or keep it.

The post “Going on Being”: Kathy Butterly in conversation with Elena Sisto appeared first on artcritical.

But it was on her painting that we focused during a recent studio visit, a week before the opening of her second solo exhibition at Theodore:Art in Bushwick. She had just returned from a month at Yaddo, where she produced virtually all of the work for the show. Her studio was lined with fifteen 18 x 24-inch painted canvas boards and two large un-stretched painted canvases. We talked about her Instagram drawings, the source of her imagery for her paintings, her personal life, how that impacts the work, and about her love of process.

LESLIE WAYNE: Sharon, last year during Dumbo Open Studios, I bought your little book of daily Instagram drawings. I was struck by what you wrote about them, that they were created using a phone app called PicsArt to be viewed specifically on a phone, and that you made them as an antidote to the frustration you felt when viewing images of people’s paintings on their tiny phone screens. I totally get that frustration and I think it’s pretty hilarious that you took the devil in this detail and turned it into a workhorse for yourself. Looking at these images, it’s hard to believe they’re not photographs of paintings. But I also notice that this book contains only a small fraction of the more than 700 Instagram drawings you made over the course of two years, posting one a day. I know that these last couple of years have been particularly challenging for you, so what was it about these Instagram drawings that really kept you going through it all? Was it the daily ritual, as a kind of meditative practice? Was it a way of marking each day, like On Kawara? Or was it a testimonial to your own thoughts and observations, the way perhaps an artist like Tom Nozkowski translates his daily experiences through abstraction?

SHARON BUTLER: I’m not sure where to begin. Since I was a kid I’ve tried to create a record of daily life, at first by keeping notebooks about my activities, and later through drawing, painting, and book projects. I started the phone drawings after my last show at Theodore:Art in 2016, which was the year my teenage daughter got swept up in the opioid crisis and the country watched Trump rise to power. I was devastated by both. Making drawings on the phone was a useful way to re-channel my Twitter preoccupation and, at the same time, process my experience. The impulse to create a translation of life through abstraction is similar to Tom Nozkowski’s, but making digital drawings seems more immediate and, well, casual. Like “I Got Up,” On Kawara’s 1968-79 postcard project, they have a time stamp, and, looking back, I see that many were posted around 4 AM, when I was often awake and worrying. Limiting the drawings to the geometric shape tools – the circle, the square, the triangle, and the diamond – I developed a visual language that is embedded with personal content. I drew through the crisis and now I have a record of the experience. As On Kawara might have said: WE ARE STILL ALIVE. My daughter has been in recovery for more than eight months.

That’s fantastic. You must be so relieved, and relieved to be in a space where you can start approaching your work in a way that’s more deliberative rather than reactive. Though you have always championed the kind of resourcefulness that allows you to create within the constraints of your given situation. I know that the term you coined, “New Casualists” was to some degree based on your own peripatetic studio life, creating a way of working that accommodated your need to move studios every few months because of rising rents and short sublets. But now you’re in a great studio with a long lease!

It’s interesting that you decided to use these Instagram drawings as direct source material for your paintings. You’ve taken these records of very specific moments in your life and translated them from their digital form to analog objects. It’s an interesting kind of visual transliteration. I’m assuming that you want there to be a dialog between the two bodies of work since you’ve written the dates of the drawings onto the paintings. It’s as if you are still processing these experiences by reanimating them through another medium. On a purely formal level, the paintings have a soft and very lovely painterly touch, and a kind of ethereal light, both of which are unexpected given their hard geometric compositions. Painted light is very different from the light that’s embedded within a screen. You mentioned that comment one often hears about beautiful paintings having a “marvelous sense of light!” I take it though that that’s not what you’re aiming for here, right?!

To address your first observation, yes, I’m more than relieved, I’m grateful to the universe and proud of my daughter for recognizing she needed help. My decision to use specific drawings as subjects rather than to simply adopt the visual language allowed me to connect to specific moments and has given the project deeper meaning. Making these paintings has enabled me to go back and really consider what we’ve been through.

In terms of light, in early painting classes there is an emphasis on creating the illusion of light through color mixing. How light changes color is so mysterious and intriguing. I’ve been working on an artist’s book for the past few years using text from a color theory devised by philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1810 based on his own detailed observations—how candle illumination changes the color of shadows and so forth—that I absolutely love. In representational work, changing color, whether from dark to light or warm to cool, gives the objects the illusion of three-dimensional shape. But creating a “marvelous sense of light” gives the painting a kind of beauty. Light is beauty. Josephine Halvorson’s paintings are wonderful examples of this truth: paintings whose subjects are enhanced through the illusion of illumination. In the digital space, color is made from light, so illumination is a given. When I create the paintings from the drawings, I think about the translation from light to paint. In many ways the natural dullness of the paint echoes the experience of remembering a traumatic episode.

The sense of surface and touch, on the other hand, are inherent to a painting, while they must be invented in the digital space. I enjoy creating the illusion of worn backgrounds, fractured shapes, and broken lines – visual phenomena that occur naturally in oil on canvas – in the phone app. On canvas, I prefer a dull surface, like the ones on abstract easel paintings from the 1940s. I think about expectations – in particular, how they change over time – and this has become part of the content. One thing I have learned is that expectations have little to do with reality.

Yes, well that certainly applies to the process of art making. We start out with an idea in mind and through the process of manipulating material, things happen and we inevitably change course – that is, if we’re any good. To stubbornly stick to a plan is to forego the ecstasy of creating.

I’m interested in your attraction to a “dull surface” and the “natural dullness of paint.” That’s actually antithetical to everything one imagines when thinking about oil painting. We think about the lusciousness of oil, its buttery consistency, the depth of color one can achieve with it and its luminosity. If these paintings are evidence of a life lived, then it appears that right now you are still churning through the murkiness of your daughter’s future, and I might add, the future of this country. We can go out and see Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” or cry during Meghan McCain’s stunning cri de coeur for her father, both powerful rebukes of our current president, and feel better afterwards for its cathartic value. But at the end of the day, we know that the forces that are driving our current culture are born from greed, fear and a hunger for power. The forces that drive our personal destiny, however, are somewhat more within our control. The fact that your daughter has turned a corner is testament to that.

Yes, it is. I’m fascinated by the way the current political situation, the anger and powerlessness we all feel, has informed artists’ work, especially artists who would never call their work political. Yes, I’m actually hopeful about the future. It’s been murky for the past two years, but, fingers crossed, it seems that we are turning in a more positive direction. (Note to readers: Don’t forget to VOTE on November 6!).

But going back to your point about oil paint, true that it is admired for its richness and luminosity, but I mean in comparison to screen images, the color is simply less bright. The comparative quality of light, brightness vs. grayness, has emotional content. I forgot to mention another attribute of oil paint that I adore is that the color changes over time. The paintings age. Which brings me back full circle to the notion of the future, which I find interesting.

So tell me about your decision to paint on these canvas boards. To me, it’s very much in keeping with the modesty and practicality of your Instagram drawings. I also love the way they’re floating on the wall.

For me, an 18 x 24-inch canvas board is like comfort food, which means I suppose that it isn’t a challenge technically. The hardness suits pencil drawing, which is how I start all the paintings. And, of course, they are inexpensive so I can buy them by the box—like sheets of paper. Hanging canvas boards is a challenge, though, and when I was up at Yaddo photographer Regina DeLuise suggested that I make French cleats to offset the boards from the wall. Once we hung them at the gallery, Stephanie said that the size and the way they hover on the wall reminds her of computer screens. I hadn’t thought of it, but I like the association.

That’s great. So without your even realizing it, you’ve enlarged the images from an iPhone format to a computer format! One last question–how do you balance your life as an artist with your life as an editor of a successful blog, and teaching as well?

Honestly, sometimes I’m overwhelmed and just want to lie on the couch and read fiction, but I’m grateful that I can support art making through teaching and publishing Two Coats of Paint. Working in the studio, especially when the country seems to be falling apart, sometimes strikes me as self-indulgent, but the reality is that I wouldn’t be able to cope if I didn’t do it. I think most artists feel the same way. In turn, teaching and writing give me the opportunity to step outside myself and make a positive contribution to the art community. I love being part of academia because of the conversations and critiques. This year I’m affiliated with Parsons, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the New York Academy of Art, where I have a slew of talented colleagues. And, frankly, I always learn something from the students, which is the best because it keeps my mind nimble and open to new ways of thinking.

The post Light is Beauty: Sharon Butler talks art, life and blogging with Leslie Wayne appeared first on artcritical.

On Friday, September 28 the two artists are set to dialogue in Elsamanoudi’s show at Amos Eno Gallery in Bushwick (56 Bogart Street), kicking off the final weekend of Nancy’s show and the immensely popular annual Bushwick Open Studios festival. artcritical will post extracts of this conversation on Saturday. The previous weekend had seen a pop-up exhibition of Natasha Wright, curated by Jeffrey Morabito and Martin Dull, which forms the basis of the conversation here.

Coincidentally, both Wright and Elsamanoudi were featured by Harpers Bazaar online – along with three other figurative painters – in “The Best Female Art Exhibitions to See This Fall.”

NATASHA WRIGHT
Do you base your paintings on small drawings or studies? How do your drawings inform your paintings? 

NANCY ELSAMANOUDI
Sometimes, I base a larger painting on a study. But usually, I work more intuitively without a firm plan about what the final image will look like.  I usually do quite a bit of drawing directly on the paint surface with graphite, charcoal, oil pastels and oil sticks to lay down the image, find the image or wipe out the image.

Drawing has been a constant in my life. But drawing for me was more like a tick. I was constantly drawing and image vomiting growing up. I’d fill sketchbook after sketchbook and then abandon them.

Before I went to Pratt for grad school, I lived in an apartment building about a block from the Cleveland Institute of Art and two blocks away from the Cleveland Museum of Art.  I’d do life drawing sessions at the CIA and sketch in the galleries at the CMA.  But at that time, I was mostly interested in abstract painting. I just thought of life drawing as a way of mining forms for abstract paintings.

Of course, I still draw quite a bit. Drawing opens up a free imaginative space. For me, the discovered image comes out of drawing.

Has there been a shift in your work recently from abstract painting to figurative painting or do you think of your more recent work as having elements of both abstraction and figuration? 

Some of my most recent work – the dick flowers paintings for example – is figurative and some combine both figurative and abstract elements. The shift towards figuration is a shift that I hadn’t really anticipated. I’ve always wanted to be a great abstract painter and I’ve always preferred abstract painting over realistic painting. I hated paintings that seemed to be about how closely the painting resembled reality. The shift happened, in part, because I began to feel like I was spinning my wheels with abstraction. You can try to go deep and find yourself just digging the same hole deeper. So, I tried to apply some of the strategies that seemed to work for writing to painting. Instead of trying to make some big grand impressive statement, I tried instead to take simple idea or thought and make a painting that would be about fleshing out that idea or unpacking a metaphor.

When I saw Hannah Gadsby’s comedy special on Nanette, I was bowled over by her take on art history and her thoughts on men as dick flowers and women as flesh vases. It was such a weird image and bizarrely potent poetic metaphor for a comedy special. As a feminist, I was sympathetic to what she was trying to say, about men exploiting women as inspiration for their art. But I also felt that she had somehow grossly oversimplified something that was complicated. I had mixed feelings about it and that’s why I painted the dick flowers series. I felt like I need to go where there was mixed feelings, ambivalence, attraction and repulsion.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about the shift in your work. As your work shifted, did you start looking at different artists? Are you looking at anyone in particular right now?

Right now, I’m drawn artists to like George Condo and Amy Sillman. Their work straddles the line between abstraction and figuration in interesting ways that allow for a different kind of space of possibilities to open up. Their work seems to have an attitude that isn’t all that overly concerned with questions of purity or whether melding together abstraction and figuration together doesn’t somehow constitute bastard art. It’s this attitude, a stance that doesn’t take either the abstract camp or the figurative camp too seriously, that, I think, opens up a space for humor and awkwardness to enter into the work.

The post A Space for Humor and Awkwardness: Nancy Elsamanoudi discusses her work with Natasha Wright appeared first on artcritical.

On Friday, September 28 the two artists are set to dialogue in Elsamanoudi’s show at Amos Eno Gallery in Bushwick (56 Bogart Street), kicking off the final weekend of Nancy’s show and the immensely popular annual Bushwick Open Studios festival. artcritical will post extracts of this conversation on Saturday. The previous weekend had seen a pop-up exhibition of Natasha Wright, curated by Jeffrey Morabito and Martin Dull, which forms the basis of the conversation here.

Coincidentally, both Wright and Elsamanoudi were featured by Harpers Bazaar online – along with three other figurative painters – in “The Best Female Art Exhibitions to See This Fall.”

NANCY ELSAMANOUDI: I’ve been following your work for some time and I noticed a shift in the paintings in your last show “Les Biches”. In this body of work, the palette seems to be more restrained, the female figure emerges in a more abstract and less narrative way. 

At the same time, I also noticed that the figures are often at times unusually cropped, so that just the torso is visible and the rest of the body is alluded to outside of the picture plane.  

This way of cropping the figure seems to make the image more ambiguous, denying the viewer a certain expected satisfaction that may come from being able to identify the figure as a particular person or with a particular narrative. Does some sort of refusal to please factor in the way you have chosen to crop the image and limit your color palette? And what is the relationship between abstraction and figuration for you? 

NATASHA WRIGHT: My work used to be far more narrative. Over time I’ve become more interested in merging figuration and abstraction. This has allowed for a more ambiguous and slower read of the paintings. Fragments of the figure are excavated out of the gesture and are buried or exposed. In a way the act of painting creates the abstraction.

In this group of work I was thinking about a more emblematic representation of the female experience and ideas of sexuality and power. I wanted the women to be universally read and began the paintings with this in mind.

I think the cropping comes from wanting to highlight a particular moment of heightened sensation or a need to draw attention to an archetypal reading of femininity.

This is the case in “Power Women” which was included in my recent show “Les Biches”. I think a lot about the representation of females throughout history from the Venus of Willendorf, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to depictions of females today.

Over time I evolved the schematic and symbolic structure of the paintings to include a more expressive and painterly approach. Materiality is something I’m increasingly interested in. I go through so much paint that the only option is to make my own….

I like this idea of female power. Can you tell me more about how it is at play in your work?

I like to think my paintings create my own symbol of female power and energy. This doesn’t only involve the subject and composition but also the attitude I bring to my paintings – I think a lot about attitude, to me the attitude is just as important as the subject.

The large scale and fast passages mean I have to feel strong and confident when I approach the canvas. The paintings go through many iterations but in the moment there is absolutely no second-guessing myself.  I often paint with my hands. In some ways the form is just a structure, a container for my own energy, power and confidence. I’m always navigating structure and application.

In my work, the substance of paint becomes an analogy for the body. Paint is used as a metaphor to create a skin of human experience. I use a wide variety of media and processes – pouring, bleeding and dyeing the canvas. I like to think of the unpredictable nature of paint as being a parallel to my life which is alive and questioning.

I can definitely see that in your work-especially in your drawings. There is an energy, directness and power in your drawings that comes out of the way you handle the materials. Is drawing important to your process? 

Drawing is essential to my process. I’ve been drawing the figure and had a fixation on the female form ever since I can remember. My grandmother was an artist. From the age of four I started drawing with her. We would spend the weekends in her studio. She taught me about art history and how to respect my materials. I’d copy the front cover of fashion magazines and make hundreds of cut out dolls. Drawing was what brought me to New York and to study at the New York Studio School.

I can see this understanding in your drawings even when you’re not working from the figure. The drawings seem to have a clear structure that comes from an understanding of anatomy. The linear qualities in your paintings are strong.  How important is drawing to your overall process?

It’s crucial. All my ideas come from my drawings. My studio usually has a rotating wall where I pin up the latest works that are inspiring me. Sometimes I photocopy my drawings and leave them on my studio floor. Naturally they become ripped, tattered and splatted with paint. Occasionally I bring these qualities or incidental marks back into the paintings.

For the last few years I’ve been trying to bring the spontaneity and playfulness of my drawings to my large-scale paintings. That’s something I think you’ve been doing very successfully Nancy. Your paintings reflect the energy of your drawings.

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