NOAH DILLON: You wanted to look at and talk about a de Kooning painting. So why did you pick Easter Monday (1955 – 56)?

DANIEL HERR: Well there’s this one, and there’s another at the Guggenheim, Composition (1955), and when I was around 17 or 18, visiting New York, I remember seeing both paintings a lot. I didn’t really understand them, but I remember thinking that they must be what painting is. I don’t think I’ve seen the one at the Guggenheim in person since then because they just don’t ever seem have it out. But this one’s always here. I really like this one.

This body of work from 1955 is one of the best that he made. There are others — ’77 for example was incredible — but this work is special, and this is definitely a larger, grander piece of that series.

When MoMA did de Kooning’s retrospective, in 2011, there were several paintings from that period together. There was Police Gazette (1955) and Saturday Night (1956), etc. I remember thinking how they must have looked when he made them — how much brighter and striking the colors must have been, because who knows what he actually used when he painted this.

It’s a pretty stark contrast to the van Goghs that we were just looking at.

Those paintings were made 75 years before this one and they still look perfect today. It’s kind of sad. But he did mostly use good materials after this. And I guess the quality of the color is not really the point of his work anyway.

You can see, too, that this one probably inspired Robert Rauschenberg. Over here, in the same gallery, you have Rauschenberg’s Winter Pool (1959), which uses newspaper and paint in a similar way. You can imagine Rauschenberg — on whom de Kooning was a big influence — seeing this and taking it for his own work. This is one of the paintings where the newsprint is still visible. He would use newspaper to soak up the oil, or keep the surface wet when he wasn’t working on the painting. In part because the newsprint is visible and was transferred, this painting has the feeling and ideas of collage with paint that I find really interesting.

He did a lot of stuff that people do now. He used to throw pieces of paper on the floor, randomly, and then draw over them, and then rearrange the pieces of paper on the canvas to transfer them. He was able to synthesize all these different painting movements in his head. What’s interesting about this series, and maybe the Woman series, was that it is to me the first de Kooning style; there was no question that this was a de Kooning. It wasn’t a copy of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, or Arshile Gorky. I’m sure he knew what he had stumbled upon, because the work looks a lot different than it did even just five years before. And this was also the first series where there wasn’t a central figure anymore.

So it doesn’t have anything that had formerly held the image together?

Well it probably did. He would always say “the figure is in there somewhere.” He called these landscape paintings, or cityscapes. It’s dark, gray, there’s the newsprint, and it resembles architecture and billboards and things you look at when you walk down the street.

And there are perspectival elements that imply a street.

Yeah: lights, people walking, motion… And the fact, too, that it’s vertical, not a pastoral view. And this little patch of green is like a Green Spaces park or plaza.

What does this artwork mean to you and the paintings you make? You’ve talked about seeing this when you were younger and it being an example of what painting is. What does it mean now?

I think it still impresses me as what painting could be. I didn’t understand it at the time, not at all. I don’t think I really understood him until I was in my mid or late 20s and I’m still learning now. He is like Picasso. He was studying Picasso basically forever; he couldn’t ever get away from that influence. And there was no reason to, because the guy made so much work and there were so many different styles, and all of it was so rich with material and intense, creative personality.

I think you can find a lot of interesting stuff by working in someone’s shadow.

You can see Picasso in this, but de Kooning’s definitely not trying to make it look like a Picasso. It’s hyper-sensitive yet hyper-aggressive. The whole series is aggressive, in the way that he made these, and the subsequent landscapes, like The Door to the River (1960), at the Whitney.

You can see Picasso here, too, in the newspaper: that element of collage is similar to his use of pasted-in or painted newspaper, faux bois, or other materials. Obviously it’s translated into something else and may be happenstance, but it is funny the way that this carries through. And, again, one can carry it forward to Rauschenberg creatively misinterpreting this move by de Kooning.

I really wouldn’t be surprised if Rauschenberg saw this de Kooning and based his entire career off of this one painting. I mean, I would have done that. There’s no reason not to. You’d be an idiot not to.

[laughing]

His intuition as a painter is so precise, so sharp.

Can you point to anything in particular that speaks to that in this?

I think every mark in here is incredibly precise. There’s no excess, nothing insufficient, or that’s too soft. In a certain way everything that’s there is supposed to be. It has this quality that all great paintings have where it just looks like it painted itself. And at this point he’s 51 years old and he’s pretty much mastered this style of painting, which explains why he then went and did something totally different. And five years after that it’s totally different again.

He was also really sharp intellectually. He gave a few public talks early on and they’re really, really funny, really eclectic, like “The Renaissance and Order” (1949) or “What Abstract Art Means to Me” (1951). He talks about the history of art and what people thought about, using imaginary painters who see things a certain way but without understanding how to see it from a historical context. They’re kind of like Surrealist, absurdist prose poems — like reading DeLillo or something. I still can’t tell half the time if he’s just teasing people or if he means things literally or if it’s a language barrier. He definitely had a sense of humor about it.

And he knew what was going on. In one of those talks, he identifies Duchamp as the most important artist of the era. He said, basically, “Duchamp is a one-man movement and he’s showing people that everyone can be their own movement, and you only have to do what you think is important.” And he said that was more important than what he himself was doing, more important than painting. He was saying that before Duchamp was even taken seriously by most people.

Do you feel like this is a particularly relevant painting, or that de Kooning’s work is especially relevant right now in a way that isn’t being thought about, recognized, or has been forgotten?

Definitely it has come back, as with the MoMA retrospective, or the shows at Gagosian and Pace in recent years.

You could see the influence in recent shows, such as “The Forever Now.” As a painter, though, I kind of liked it better when it wasn’t popular. I remember being in school and painting like this and people would be like, “What are you doing? You can’t do this. Stop it.” Now everyone thinks they are abstract artists. The irony is that de Kooning didn’t identify at all with the term “abstract art.”

They’re also all much younger than he was when he made this painting. You described how long it took de Kooning to get out from under Picasso, and it’s going to take them time to get out from under de Kooning, and whoever else they’re looking at.

Do you want to say anything about this artwork in this gallery, in this museum? Does that have any bearing on what it looks like to you, how you experience it?

He’s a New York painter; it’s made in New York and it gets to live in a New York museum forever. Seeing the museums and galleries in person, you learn what kind of artist you want to be. Every time I would visit the city I would go the Met and I started wanting to see the de Koonings. I remember I thought they were ugly, early on. I always thought about how ugly the Woman paintings are.

They’re kind of a mess.

They’re definitely not clean. And I thought art was supposed to be clean because that’s what my teachers told me. Or maybe I just had a clean upbringing.

What do you make of the title, Easter Monday?

It has the ambivalence and duality that critics talk about with respect to his work. But a lot of times he and other New York School painters, in general, didn’t title their work. They used names like Composition X or Untitled XI, or Picture or whatever. Or their wives or girlfriends titled the work. Nobody really cared that they didn’t care what the title was. I like it. It’s Easter Monday: a special day but an ordinary day

Some of this generation titled their works, too, as a reflection of where they were in their lives. They named their paintings for the season or the day, or a place, such as Richard Diebenkorn’s various series. I connect with that, too, because those were about making a painting that reminds you of a certain place. His work in the Hamptons wasn’t serene, but the palette was different — a little brighter, a little more floral. All of his work is intense though; there are no laid-back de Koonings.

Do you want to say anything else about why it’s important to the work that you make?  

I just like how American his work is, even though he’s technically European. It’s so America-in-the-‘50s — tough, with a cigarette. He’s like a boxer, bashing away while he listens to Igor Stravinsky. The poor immigrant boy who comes of age during the time of American empire. There are all these influences: the classical Dutch art-school training, Surrealism, Existentialism, working in advertising and sign painting, the poverty of the Depression, and then meeting all these other artists around him like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Josef Albers.

What I’m always asking myself is what didn’t he do? The same things he was asking probably about Picasso. But if you’re starting to learn how to play jazz you don’t begin with third-tier improvisers. You go to Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane. If you’re interested in painting, you don’t start with lesser artists. De Kooning is what he is for a reason; it’s not like he just happened to become an important painter. He’s better. It lets you see where the bar is, how high it is. That’s important if you want to continue to do something different.

The post Tell Me: with Daniel Herr appeared first on artcritical.

I’ve been visiting — with artists, writers, curators, dealers, and others in the art world — to look at one artwork of my guest’s choice. We have a one-on-one conversation about the artwork, what they find interesting in it and why it’s important to them. In this edition, painter Anne Sherwood Pundyk and I went to her studio in Mattituck, New York, to look at her ongoing painting project, The Revolution Will Be Painted.

Noah Dillon: So what are we looking at?

Anne Sherwood Pundyk: It’s a painting I made last fall called The Revolution Will Be Painted. It’s 15 feet wide by 11 feet high, on unstretched canvas. It was originally a drop cloth I had used on the floor of several different studios. You can see evidence of this along the unpainted edge. I used latex paint for the large indigo Rorschach shapes and the field of red. The multi-colored chevrons are in acrylic with colored pencil guidelines. Not all of it is visible because it’s folded under to fit the wall in my studio here in Mattituck. Since the piece was finished, it has been installed in four different locations. In all instances the painting has been partially hidden, subject to the constraints of the wall configuration and ceiling height of each space.

What’s the origin of this painting?

In the fall of 2012 I moved my studio to Bushwick and then TriBeCa; I got the tarp for these spaces. Around that time, the focus of my art writing evolved to an examination of a circle of radical feminist performance artists. Bianca Casady invited me to create with her the magazine Girls Against God (GAG), which is published by Capricious. This became an intensely collaborative time for me involving writing, editing and performance events. Consequently, some of what was going on with the work in my studio was being pulled out of its original concerns and constraints and apart from painting, into universes I felt an affinity with, but hadn’t engaged with so directly.

The drop cloth originally intended to protect the floor became the site of gatherings and group projects. (It has pollen, red wine and soy sauce stains to prove it!) By the spring of 2014 I knew I would be moving my studio here to Mattituck permanently. Simultaneously, I began co-curating an exhibition and performance series called “Milk and Night,” at Gallery Sensei on the Lower East Side. I’d wanted to paint one of the gallery’s walls for my own piece in the show, but it wasn’t permitted, so I opted to use my trusted studio tarp to create the monumental effect I wanted for what became The Revolution Will Be Painted.

How does this relate to some of the other art that you like, or what you like about art generally? This spans several disciplines, so in addition to painting in the specific it seems like it also means a lot to you with regard to art more broadly.

It has to do with Painting, with a capital P. I learned a lot from the activist performance artists and joined their ranks, and continue to be there. But there is amongst some members of this tribe, generally speaking, a lack of appreciation — maybe even disdain — for painting as a medium. As a painter, it felt like a significant misunderstanding. I began to realize that I was among people who maybe wouldn’t ever appreciate that about me.

Of course the role of painting — here, now, and historically — is highly contested, but also beloved. It’s a medium that’s simultaneously well understood and mysterious. And it’s who I am; I can’t separate it from how I picture the world. More to the point, I see painting as a revolutionary act that resides within the individual. Both painting and any personal revolution happens first inside one’s own consciousness before its can be expressed in the material world. The title represents how important I think painting is and that it’s as effective and stirring as performance, or any other art form or activist statement for that matter.

There’s also the reference to the performative poetry and jazz of Gil Scott-Heron, which invokes that context of activity and vocality.

Yeah. In the months after making “Milk and Night,” Nicole J. Caruth, at Art21 Magazine, invited me to write “The Revolution Will Be Painted.” I adapted Scott-Heron’s poem to express what I was talking about: that revolutionary acts are part of the process of painting and have to do with seeing, and the changeability and strength of subjectivity. And it’s a textual version of that same urge. I read through all the art books I have, collecting sentences that jumped out at me, describing work by everyone across the ages from Willem de Kooning and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Cecily Brown and Edouard Manet. There are about 40 footnotes. I fit those lines into Scott-Heron’s cadence, using excerpts where the writer hits on that flame you find in good painting.

And there’s the poetic relationship between the painting and the spell you wrote for GAG, right?

Yes, the chevron pattern in The Revolution Will Be Painted, developed from a piece I wrote for the second issue of GAG, which is all about witches past and present. I had researched spells and created a protective spell that a mother might cast over her children as they make their way in the world. I made a video to go with that piece and shot footage for it here in the countryside, and inside the house. At one point I turned around and saw my own shadow on a rug with a chevron pattern and had a sort of vision of the chevrons radiating out of my body. As a mother, I thought there was an appreciable power in that moment and all the things that go into that connection with your children, and I committed to using that shape as an assertive spiritual symbol in The Revolution Will Be Painted. That the different audiences for the work have been drawn to it based on its visual dynamic tells me it transcends my own personal experience of the forms.

Painting has a relationship to performance just by the fact that there is an action involved in making a mark. So you’re not just talking about the personal, interior performance, but also that you were engaging with these artists and ended up with work that is a palimpsest of the performative aspect of painting — a material manifestation of what transpired.

Right. When I was making this painting in August it was boiling and there was no air conditioning in my TriBeCa studio, only a pitiful fan. I had a sad ballad by Bruce Springsteen, “The Last Carnival,” on repeat while I was crawling on my hands and knees, painting, trying to cover this large red portion as I was running out of paint, and weeping to the song. Incidentally, the song is about the end of a season of a traveling circus and the dispersal of its performers. The line, “Where have you gone my handsome Billy?,” also conjured my father, Dirck Brown, who died in 2002, who like my performance friends was charming and intuitive.

Like literally blood, sweat, and tears, right? And the whole thing might feel like a total disaster until it works.

It subsumed me. But it was incredible. I had a very limited amount of time yet somehow I knew exactly what I needed to do — but as you said, utter failure was potentially lurking in the wings. I was trying to figure out what should go where and how the colors would read, which I think of as painting at its purist. I was also in some form of mourning, knowing that I’d already kind of left the sphere of that particular group of performance artists with whom I’d been enamored. I knew that the era was going to end and I would move out here and there was some new, really big chapter beginning. Consequently, this is a painting that, despite functioning very differently, connects deeply with my ongoing body of painting work.

One thing that I’m curious about is how an artwork’s environment affects someone’s relationship to it. You’ve shown this in different ways at different places. I wonder what you think about the painting’s relationship to the place it’s in right now and maybe in comparison to earlier iterations of it in other spaces.

It was interesting to bring it out to show you today: I had it all folded up and was thinking about how to install it here — whether it could be narrower or taller depending on which wall I chose. The way it reads is consistent throughout the different installations, which I attribute to the color, the scale, and the dynamic of the activity within oceans of neutral. It’s physical malleability feels to me a bit like a protective nomad’s tent with talismanic powers. It’s now on the cover of the London based magazine, HYSTERIA’s fifth issue. I’m hoping that we can find some space to show it at its full capacity related to the issue’s New York launch.

That’s funny, that you have this piece that you, its author, have only ever seen once in its entirety.

Many of the decisions I made in painting it were done just by visualizing it as a whole; and even if I couldn’t see certain portions, I could feel them viscerally.

Can you say, finally, why you wanted to talk about this piece? Why do you find this especially pertinent to your relationship to art and what you find in it?

I think because it’s been with me through this epic process of unearthing and ultimate return to painting. The necessity of the individual authorship of the painting is as subversive as anything else. The whole experience of getting to the point of making it involved many unplanned, unexpected challenges, and I think that’s part of art for me. It may not be a typical piece, but in terms of the aspects of my personality and ambition and commitment to color in a very pure way, it’s very characteristic of things that are important to me.

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