art conversation

Short Talk With Jen Dragon

Kathleen Cullen — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 23:45:43 +0000

Short Talk With Jen Dragon Kathleen Cullen June 30, 2020 - 19:45

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Katharine T. Carter & Associates has a long established history in marketing artists and launching careers. Recently Jen Dragon joined this company as the Associate Director of Special Projects at Katharine T. Carter & Associates, overseeing the social media and digital marketing division. Given the huge shift to online galleries because of the health concern I thought it was timely to speak to Jen about this exciting synergy.

Kathleen Cullen: Tell us how you first came to know Katharine T. Carter and when the collaboration became an idea.

Jen Dragon: Before I started working with Katharine, I had a brick-and-mortar gallery in Saugerties called Cross Contemporary Art. I first heard of Katharine before we met as she has an impressive reputation in the artmarketing field. One day, an art critic was visiting the gallery and needed a ride to her office in Kinderhook to see an artist's work. I volunteered to drive him as an excuse to meet her. On our visit, she insisted we drive nearby to visit Jack Shainman’s School as well as Art Omi. About a year after that magical afternoon, I decided to close my gallery space and take on curatorial projects and digital marketing for my artists. Coincidently, I heard she was looking for a new associate, and I applied. I have been with KTC since Sept. 2019. KTC was interested in my consulting with her company to build on-line marketing strategies that would be indispensable for her clients. This collaboration culminated in the co-creation of Cross Contemporary Partners

KC: In this collaboration, given the strengths of both your backgrounds, what do you feel the mission of this division of your company will be? And how will that be different from other programs and services you offer?

JD: Katharine has a solid background in guiding artists' careers, securing exhibitions in museums and other non-profit spaces, as well as building their reputations in the art world. My skills are different. I understand how to grow the artist's "digital footprint" through social media. Our mission remains the same: serving the career growth of our artist clients through the multiple platforms in our toolbox. For Katharine, it is her 35 year relationships with curators, her knowledge and practiced eye; for me, it is my background in Online Marketing and experience as a gallerist. It is the combination of our respective talents that provides artists with a complete 21st Century marketing strategy.

KC: Given the change in the art world with the recent pandemic, what is the business model of the new company? How is this different from what you had originally intended?

JD: The Pandemic has created a sense of urgency. By launching Cross Contemporary Partners, the new division at Katharine T. Carter & Associates, we effectively address the current challenges faced by the art world and its sudden shift to the internet. This was the ideal moment to develop Cross Contemporary Partners because technology and new ideas are emerging daily which offer elegant viewing rooms, 3-D galleries, virtual studio visits via Zoom, and Instagram LIVE… and we plan to incorporate this and much more into what we do for artists! However, we intend to maintain the tactile aspect of marketing: utilizing elegant catalogues with essays by leading art critics and curators, providing high quality color reproduction, supportive written correspondence in a highly professional presentation delivered directly to art professionals across the country as a prelude to the actual art installation in a museum. This traditional approach has led to securing over 1000 exhibitions nationwide.

KC: Together you have unique perspectives at both curating and marketing. Going forward, given that it's now a collaboration, how will you select the artists that you represent and still maintain your individual voices?

JD: We generally see eye-to-eye on almost everything regarding aesthetics and marketing logistics. Katharine has is an encyclopedic knowledge of artists and their work, museum directors and curators, and more often than not, knows them personally. Her team of Associates is comprised of leading critics, curators, designers, videographers and technicians working in tandem to achieve desired results; my skillset is more connected to the nuts and blots of art handling and installation, gallery management and using digital marketing to promote artist events. Where we dovetail is in the effectiveness of our presentation formats and marketing focus: hitting the high notes respectively as we draw attention to our artists and their work. Katharine knows how to tangibly guide their careers and I know how to digitally support events, engaging audiences for exhibitions, and creating gallery interest for potential representation and sales.

KC: Indulge us with a show that you would love to do without concerns of social distancing or economics? Please provide us with the details?

JD: Ideally, we would love to curate an exhibition of our Cross Contemporary Partners artists: Anne Hieronymus, Sol Hill, Kaethe Kauffman, Victoria Lowe, Deborah Masters, John Lyon Paul, Nancy Macko, Francie Lyshak, Robert Mango, Bobbie Moline-Kramer, and Martin Weinstein in a huge industrial building with 20 foot high ceilings. But because of the pandemic, we are instead installing their work in our new 3-D virtual gallery space hosted by Kunstmatrix in Berlin which realistically replicates the look and feel of the actual gallery or museum experience. To prepare for the CCP launch and our new 3-D gallery space, we have been curating an online exhibition fundraiser for the Woodstock Film Festival. For 24 years, the WFF has been the lynchpin for arts and culture in our region contributing over time more than 250 million dollars to sustaining economic viability in our area. If we lose this event, we lose a lot! Katharine and I have reached out to every painter, sculptor and printmaker we know to create an online benefit sale. Our artists responded to our call and have generously donated amazing work to support the festival, and more art just keeps coming! You can visit the growing exhibition listings on Artsy here: http://bit.ly/wffbenefit20 and we will launch the virtual 3-D gallery on June 19th.

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Congratulations!

Yeah, Jen.

Katherine Carter

I have the utmost respect for Katherine T. Carter and her associates, all top notch. First met her in Northampton, MA in the early '90's at Hart Gallery for a talk and followed by a studio visit also did an excursion to NYC galleries another time. I've used what she taught me now for decades.
Jen, I've been following you since Millicent Young exhibited at your gallery. It seems your timing couldn't have been better with the need for quality virtual exhibitions.
It may be time to reconnect, so glad Jen you working with her organization.

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Little Q + A About Carroll Dunham

Dusty Wright — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 14:00:00 +0000

Little Q + A About Carroll Dunham Dusty Wright June 12, 2018 - 10:00

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Any Day, 2017 Urethane, acrylic and pencil on linen, 78 x 100"

Carroll Dunham, Gladstone Gallery, NYC | April 20-June 16, 2018

"Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man, look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show." David Bowie

Millree Hughes: What is it? How do I know it's good? In the old days the paper would tell you, the TV would tell you. If it was cultural there was one station that specifically dealt with that Now, unfortunately, it is hard to tell. There are too many voices vying for your attention. Which one is trustworthy? If you are an artist or a musician, an actor, or a writer, you can use your judgement. But if you're not, how can you tell, for example, if a painting is worth looking at?

Carroll Dunham has never been willing to talk about what his pistol-penis packing Puritans or his funky female figures are actually about. He has only ever talked about his work formally and how it relates to Art history. How his female figures relate to Cezanne's bathers for example. But I found myself at his last show asking: "Can we talk about the assholes?".

This time is no different. Painted in 2017 they are not necessarily about the American election. Despite that many of the paintings are of two cavemen with bushy manes and floppy dicks battling it out in the woods. I see the wrestling figures from Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women of 1612 and something of the simplicity and figural dynamism of Picasso's Figures on the Beach of 1931. Dunham creates a great, in the middle, in your grill, physicality. He has stripped the figure back to grubby white canvas contained by a thick black line. There's a tree green and a sky blue. But after that there’s not much left on your plate to eat, other than the meat and two veg.

Bradley Rubenstein: That flora and fauna are crucial here. He has painted those with a different hand, they seem more layered on a la David Salle's work than actually part of the scene. And that dog is such weird combination of kitsch cuteness, and a schoolboy reference to dog’s licking their balls. It is that combination we saw with his last show at Gladstone, a Lady Godiva on a horse. There was a series of working drawings that rendered the scene over and over, until gradually you had a childlike drawing, a sort of set of notes on regression therapy, or the kind of children’s drawings of nude family members where the parent is like, "Do I need to worry about this?"

But there is humor here that is both course and refined at the same time. There is a dyptich, or two variations on a theme, of a rear view shot of testicles and anus. In one the anus is on top, in the second, it is balls up. One the one hand it is an almost Picasso-like abstraction, integrating the body into the landscape, like in his late paintings. On the other hand it reminds me of an old Joan Rivers joke:

"So I am in bed last night and my husband says, 'Joan, your box is too tight and your ass is too loose.' And I say, 'Edgar get off my back.'"

MH: American artists frequently tell you that what you are looking at it is not what they meant you to see. Chuck Close claims that his work is about the formal language of painting. He's just been practicing on what is closest to him. They just happened to be the famous artists of the day. Vanessa Beecroft exhibited a room full of beautiful naked women in Prada heels but only ever talked about them as if they were objects. Jeff Koons is particularly good at pinning some glorious "advert bullshit" to his masthead. It's about desire! It's about beauty! Anything other than what you are actually looking at.

BR: There is something about Dunham's nudes that kind of seem timely now. There are younger artists who deal with the same ideas but in some cases their simple act of painting the nude is political. Noomi Roomi, a Moscow artist said:

"If we will look back at ancient Greece for example, where homosexuality was common, we'll notice how inspirational was male's body for artists of that time. They depicted both female's and male's beauty because they didn't have any non-hetero taboos, they were opened to both genders. I guess, the problem of not drawing bodies in sexual context can be seen as that we still have this fear, we still perceive male's nudity as something 'gay.' Also, women do reflect on themselves -- maybe that's why they paint female's bodies more often, although I don't understand why modern female artists don't explore the male as much. But, it should be noted that my art was never exhibited in galleries or on festivals in Russia because no one dared exhibit them. I only got positive responses from Russian audiences, but never got any permission to show my works publicly. Also, I was rejected when I wanted to print my books in Moscow, because my art was seen as dangerous, prohibited… people are clearly afraid."

Dennis Kardon: Dunham's new paintings are sexual, but not homosexual. They are very much about a white straight guy trying to come to terms with his attitude towards male bodies, starting with his own, as expressed by the fact that the two figures are almost the same, so I assume they are aspects of himself in turmoil, or at least wrestling with the idea of his maleness. In the last two shows, one of which I reviewed for Art in America, the female body was seen as an other, or as a muse, and always depicted alone, so I guess accessible to artist/viewer. The paintings of trees on the other hand seemed a stand in for the male body. And they still have a formal metonymy with cocks and balls.

The history of body depictions in Western painting is usually that women's bodies are objects of desire and men's bodies are objects of torture or competition, with the exception of Caravaggio or David. Manet's Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers is a great example of the different male attitudes of masculinity. In Dunham the wrestlers do not touch each other erotically, though there is a certain tenderness expressed that is just short of a caress. Penises are never erect or semi-erect.

The abundance of assholes, feels to be about fear of penetration, and dominance. I keep waiting for one of the wrestlers to stick a club in one. When a lone male is lying down, the painting is titled Left for Dead, which is telling, as if abandonment is the issue, and the competition is not innocent. I did find it interesting that he eroticized men's nipples, making them erect and pink, and pretty much the way he paints women's nipples.

MH: Why are American artists so evasive about content? Why do they put something right in your face and then pretend that they don't see. The separation between content and intent that is endemic to really successful American art begins when it leaves the studio. The galleries attempt to legitimize the art. If the painting is worth a lot of money It must be on a continuum with everything else that rich people buy. It needs to be placed in history. Something is good because its like something else that has already proved itself.

DK: I disagree with your idea about content as a visual narrative that a painter should verbally address. Content occurs in the ambiguity that a painter establishes, and is something that viewers could address verbally, but it is not the business of a painter to spoil for viewers. So instead painters address their physical actions in the creating of the painting, or even the feelings that that might arise, which is why the formal structure is safe to talk about. I think artists today talk way too much about content or subject matter in their work which should be left to a viewer to try to come to terms with.

BR: The last thing I want to bring up is that Dunham is dealing with depictions of sex, and in an odd way with the sexuality of painting. I like what Mira Schor wrote:

"I would lay claim both to being polymorphously perverse, because after all why shouldn’t painting benefit from the input of more than one sense, and also to having the very same body part, connecting my optic nerve and my hand to my sexuality, especially if sexuality is defined as not just the province of genital intercourse but as a profound life/death drive. It is in fact precisely this intersection of visuality, sexuality, and manual impulse that makes me a painter. And I would add something left out of this particular biological theory, that is, the connection of optic nerve, sexuality, and hand to intellect."

I think there is something of late Picasso in Dunham's work. That acting out or recreating sexual encounters on canvas.

DK: The day Dunham really ups the ante will be the day when one of those guys is black, and I will be interested in how he will depict his dick. All the people in Dunham's recent paintings are as white as can be; the white of the primed canvas.

MH: So stop focusing on the cocks, the pussies and the assholes they are in Dunham's work to get the punters in the door. Once they are there they should be looking at how the paintings are made and what other artists they refer to… right?

BR: Yeah, "boys keep swinging, boys always work it out!"

Mr. Rubenstein is NYC-based painter, story teller, and smart culture aficionado.

Mr. Hughes was born in North Wales in 1960, son of an Anglican priest. He began making art on the computer in 1998 in NYC.

Mr. Kardon has been valiantly applying CPR to painting, which once had as its heart the means to express of specific feeling, for several decades. Mr. Kardon has recently found it a good idea to put into print some of his more pointed ideas about his practice.

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Little Q+A: Gina Magid and Bradley Rubenstein

Dusty Wright — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 06:47:43 +0000

Little Q+A: Gina Magid and Bradley Rubenstein Dusty Wright September 16, 2014 - 02:47

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Gina Magid is a Brooklyn-based painter who creates psychologically and visually layered imagery in paint, charcoal, satin, and other materials. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2003 and a McDowell Colony Fellowship in 2004. Magid has had solo exhibitions at Feature Inc., New York; Acuna-Hansen Gallery, Los Angeles; and Artists Space, New York. Her work has been included in group shows at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, New York; DiverseWorks, Houston, Texas; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Exit Art, New York; and Greater New York 2005 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York. Her work is currently at Ana Cristea Gallery, 521 West 26th Street, New York.

Bradley Rubenstein: Growing up on Long Island and being near New York City with all of its museums and galleries, did that have a big effect on you?

Gina Magid: I didn’t have a ton of access to art when I was a kid. It wasn’t especially encouraged nor valued in my family or in the public schools I attended. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I began to discover it on my own.

I visited MoMA sometimes. I saw a Francis Bacon retrospective that greatly influenced me. I thought they were morbidly beautiful and violent. I remember them with candy-colored backgrounds. I also read the collection of interviews between Bacon and David Sylvester, which, early on, had a profound impact on the development of my studio practice.

As a teenager I responded to the boldness of German Expressionism and Abstract Expressionists such as Franz Kline and Egon Schiele. Early artistic influences were probably Cy Twombly, Henry Darger, Basquiat, and Schnabel. I also looked a lot at Rita Ackermann, Karen Kilimnik, Richard Prince, Mike Kelley, and Elizabeth Peyton and still do. I guess I'm absorbing and being influenced all of the time by the works I see and love. It's reassuring to experience other artists who I feel like I can relate to, artistically speaking. Others often reference Sigmar Polke, Picabia, and even David Salle during visits to my studio -- I think because my use of layered and psychologically charged imagery has something in common with these artists.

BR: I remember talking with you a while ago, after seeing some of your recent pieces, and remarking that it seemed like you’d never seen a painting before. Your work somehow has a quality that is truly innovative -- not innovative in a planned sense but more like really good punk music. It has an “I don’t know what’s gonna happen next” feel for me. I also get that looking at Clyfford Still, for example. Here is this guy who just made it up as he went along. How do you feel about that? I know you are actually a really good printmaker. You know technique.

GM: I do know printmaking technique, but I never formally studied painting. I learned from looking at art, as well as from reading what artists have to say, and then figuring it out for myself. I'm a process painter, in that I don't usually plan my pieces out ahead of time. I try to be as present as possible when working and to continually respond to the painting as it develops. It's a kind of meditation.

BR: Your paintings are packed with imagery. Some of it is really loaded, I think. Things mutate from one form to another. It seems like you kind of riff off the paint as you work. Can you describe how it all comes together for you?

GM: I draw from a collection of found and created images, art historical references, colors, words, memories, and ideas. Anything, really, that moves me or that I'm thinking about will be collected, brought into the studio, and may find its way into a painting. Sometimes years later it becomes relevant or I find the right place for it within a piece. The images that I use are always meaningful for me; sometimes they work as clues or fragments of language -- visual language. I'm finding that I tend to return to the same imagery over and over again. Now, after almost fifteen years of painting, I can see patterns emerging.

It's difficult for me to explain my process in the studio. When it's going well, I feel like an alchemist, working with forces I can only partially control.

BR: Is it an intuitive process for you? Or do you already have some idea in mind of where you’re heading?

GM: It's an intuitive way of working. This is great when it's all gelling but hard to find when it's not. I sometimes wish I had more of a structural framework to rely on. That could also be said of my feelings toward life in general.

BR: Going back to Bacon, one of the things he said about his process seems to relate to your process: "I hope to be able to have the first instinctive kind of basic thing and then to be able to work, almost directly, as though one were painting a new picture."

GM: Well I'm not sure what exactly he was thinking there, but I can see how it might relate to my philosophy a bit. Right...like I don't want to ever have a formula or understand it completely. Rather, I approach my time with a kind of beginner's mind, in order to discover something new.

BR: Looking at the paintings in your show this Fall, I couldn’t help but note similarities of subjects or themes that you still work with -- but these things had been layered differently. In some, your subjects were kind of "floaty." In others they were piled up more archeologically. Archeology actually seems to be a really great way to approach your work -- seeing images piled up over time. Is this how you see what you're doing, or is it just one way of reading the pictures?

GM: Sometimes paintings end up very minimal, and other times they become layered and rich with imagery. There's not much in between. One of my paintings, "Making the Bunny," addresses this. In it, the figure is attempting to form an unruly mass into a rabbit, but it's not going very well. For me, this is an allegory of the artist's work. The figure is trying to somehow shape all of this energy into something beautiful that she can love, but it's difficult. Kind of like Dr. Frankenstein trying to bring to life his beautiful monster!

BR: You were working on a painting last Fall that I really liked of a dead skunk. The painting ended up getting a pair of swans, which really changes the tone of the piece, taking it from some kind of existentially dark and creepy place to something just weird. How intentional are these sorts of things? Or is it just that you felt like adding the swans at the expense of the original idea?

GM: The original idea of the painting is still there. I painted the dead skunk from life during a residency in Wyoming at the Ucross Foundation. I began a series of roadkill paintings because I passed them each day as I rode my bike to the studio, and their presence really affected me. Living in New York we are quite cut off from nature, so encountering wildlife -- both dead and alive -- was a profound visual and emotional experience for me. I watched as those animals on the road deteriorated each day. It was awful. And there were always new ones. I started thinking about how animals have no idea of what is going on as far as cars are concerned, cars being just one element of this artificial world we are creating. We live so out of sync with the rest of the life on this planet.

The pair of swans at the bottom of the canvas I added much later. They were derived from a very different cultural reference, but the painting is still about the skunk. Now the swans can add their own mystery, magic, beauty, and maybe even some love to the piece. I don't like things to be too direct or about just one thing, because that is never how I experience life. It is much more complex and layered.

The Color and the Shape

Bradley Rubenstein — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 03:20:09 +0000

The Color and the Shape Bradley Rubenstein April 13, 2013 - 23:20

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Bradley Rubenstein: Can you give me a little of your backstory? I know you went to Yale for painting, but you have also been a sign painter and worked in movies and TV, and you are also a musician. How has all of that informed your work?

John Paul: In St. Louis I had solid training, and at Yale exposure to cutting-edge thinking.

The St. Louis years were dominated by the importance of Max Beckmann, who taught there after the war until the Fifties. His canvases were a part of a student's daily diet, lining a corridor between the schools of art and architecture.

In New Haven the lesson given was freedom! -- through hard work within the canons of modern art. Jack Tworkov and Al Held were the proponents -- and Knox Martin, a dynamic mind in the unlocking of intuitive power.

After a brief stint in teaching in New England, I went to California. There I met West Coast painters Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, and others in his circle through Yale classmate George Lloyd. The Pacific landscape was a welcome change in feeling, with a hidden benefit of being away from the hot contest of career in New York.

In 1972 I returned to New York and soon set up a studio as neighbor and assistant to Ilya Bolotowsky. My friend Larry Rosen owned an art edition press called Chiron, and I was able to meet Ilya and other famous New York artists. Larry introduced me to Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, Jack Youngerman, Tom Wesselmann, Larry Rivers, Red and Mimi Grooms, and others. The Seventies were an exciting time, and I painted both in natural and pop veins. I adored the fast brush of Alex Katz, trying my hand at figure and portrait -- and some still lifes in the studio environment.

By the Eighties I was working in a sign shop, painting outdoor walls and billboards. This was my first commercial painting career -- a different approach to the city environment, perspective, and materials. In addition to covering acres of space as a commercial artist, I worked pro bono on art murals with my friend and sign brother Stefano Castronovo, who was a pioneer in New York art murals (Knox, an earlier pioneer). Stefano's motif was the Mona Lisa, with drunken red eyes. It wasn't in the cards for me to attempt pop collage like Rosenquist -- way too dominant and original to be a shared context. He also was going towards something very painterly but "non painting." That scared me. I didn't want to be a total grown-up, like Donald Judd or Dan Flavin. I could even concede that they were right. Just not right for me.

The Seventies was like waiting in Casablanca for the figure to return to art. When it did, that would include some old favorites like Raoul Middleman and Charles Cajori, and the landscapes of Wolf Kahn. It would also mean a return to the stuffy museum painting of the New York Academy and the English tea cups of artists like William Bailey (a fine portrait draftsman but an awful artist).

Music? That's a hobby, and if it ever gets into my work like it did for Romare Bearden, that would be natural. To play jazz means to wade or swim in a stream of heroes. There are no more exemplary artists than the players and composers of modern music. If you know a tune well enough to improvise, you have an inner reference and calm much like dreaming. Take that to the next level? Perform with others? You have to want that like the footballer wants to score a goal. It's another language structure -- free but with rules. You need to know the rules. I'll always be a beginner as a tenor sax player, so I concentrate on tone and sound. It's a love interest.

BR: In your paintings there are a lot of references to late Picasso, and maybe some of Chagall's more theatrical paintings. You create these narratives that are lyrical and oblique. What inspires them?

JP: Not enough can be known about Chagall. Picasso is said to have likened him to Renoir in his capture of light. He has a delicate but unconcealed hand informed by geometry -- an avid "doodler." I want my work to come out of drawing, out of the act of drawing.

I asked Knox Martin what it was like to be working in New York near de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, painting under the gun of a living Picasso in the pioneer Fifties, Sixties, and early Seventies. He didn't go down that memory lane but was always stunned and amazed by Picasso, especially the sculpture.

In those Mosquetero paintings, Picasso is baroque -- he identifies with the great Baroque painters like Rubens, Velázquez, Titian, El Greco, and especially Rembrandt, who also shared a theatrical and valiant interest in history. There are so many different ways that Picasso defies placement in categories and avoids redundancy.

Baroque? The paintings jump out at you as feats and exploits; the baffling formal solutions and graphic illusions are a circus, the metaphors invented and wrung through the shaping process before your eyes, with nothing concealed. Also noted, the freshness of the palate, the plenty and disposable quantity of the material. Working in the shop taught me to not be stingy about paint.

BR: There is a decorative aspect to some of them -- probably a size thing. They look like they could easily fit into the Lapin Agile or something. You are playing with the size that used to be called "easel painting" and working in an area that the Ab Ex guys kind of opened up. Has working on large-scale projects like painting a building or movie sets given you a broader range, or have you always aimed for this kind of "bigness" in the work? There is a great sense of drama in some of them.

JP: Big canvases were the thing in the Seventies, and I had a front-row seat with Alex Katz. A few remember that there was an ad hoc Sunday basketball game on the Canal and Thomson Street asphalt court. Larry Rosen, Herb Schiffrin, Peter Schjeldahl, Porfirio di Donna, Joe Zucker, and others played, for a season or two, a good-natured game of hoops.

In 1976 or so, Larry landed a show at André Emmerich on 420 West Broadway -- all raw canvas stained with Dalmatian spots. At some point he lost interest, and I wound up with a bunch of large stretchers. I copied what Alex was doing, blowing up smaller paintings to oversize. I used French ashtrays and duck decoys, liquor bottles, any handy thing. I didn't care that people called me a copycat. Alex himself didn't quite like what I was doing. He told me to stop using that size (and elementary color) as a format and to be more personal. It took me a while to work out of that mode. I think the fun and nastiness of the Eighties helped make that break.

When I was working outdoors, we would have to get up an image to fit a 14' x 48' or a 20' x 60' on a daily basis. So the idea of scale was totally blown. Actually Alex was helpful in getting me into billboards. I called him to see if I could work on his Times Square mural. He gave me the contacts.

You would have to be a scenic drop painter to know the fun of sketching forms bigger than your body, but that would be under the gun of the foreman, and the risks of mistakes are much bigger. Our mistakes were not artistic, and they could be fatal -- about safety and the lack thereof. I went to work in the morning promising my wife I'd wear the safety harness, but that didn't always happen. And the ropes we were given to rig with were more likely than not threadbare and corkscrewed from age. There was something very retro about our shop.

I "apprenticed" with Louis Concha, a Spaniard of Franco vintage; my eyes were opened: how to eliminate the fuss of detail and paint "for the distance." The optical length is a factor. You can kill a portrait, flowers, or a car by overly polishing. Louis showed me shortcuts, transparencies.

So what you see in Impressionism also happened in New York. There are academic realists who overdevelop forms and meticulously explain the container of each scene. Others simplify and abandon "depth" of that kind for a more personal impact. Katz is just one good example of that. Manet, for the Impressionists.

There's another factor that plays into depth for me, and that's my vision itself. I had an accident in art school while working for a doctor, bartering room and board for service as a domestic helper. One of the duties dealt with the doctor's wife's diet cola. One day a case of bottles blew up in my face, damaging my left eye. That led to a flattening of my "space" (and other more complex mental adjustments). The idea of seeing space in 3D became academic. This was at a time when Al Held went from his aggressive icons and shapes to the start of Baroque Neo-Constructivism. I was confused, but I could see lots of depth in paintings. This is because good paintings have an underlying or concealed geometric design, not just the schematic or standardized perspective.

To get back to your question: making painting bigger is as much a risk as keeping in a timid, amateur format. I feel comfortable with the mural idea and was thrilled with the Diego Rivera show at the MoMA. It could also go back to St. Louis and Beckmann. The dynamic and psychological size of Beckmann's canvas is exponentially greater than the literal measurements. And when he gangs them up as a triptych -- whoah!

So if I like a theme, and it comes from a concern that belongs in my world, it can go any size. Public murals are a definite interest.

BR: You just had a solo show in Brooklyn called Rain Check.

JP: The title was a form of modest expectation. As a "professional" my resume has huge gaps, and I have not kept many appointments with "destiny." But so many people showed up on a dismal blustery night, my comrades from many bars, many laughs and trials in their lives -- the show must go on, and I was extremely gratified.

It was fun and good practice to place a live bet on mostly current work. The umbrella series is from the last two years, all from "abstract" or imagination. The soft 6' x 11' panels were all done specifically to bend with the seventy-foot convex curved wall in the Salena Gallery. I painted all of them and two more between January and the end of February. That was like a contract deadline, and I felt pressure -- not an unusual feeling in my past business of outdoor signs. So the images wandered off-theme in three out of five: Spring Street, the Bathers, and Observation Car. Spring Street is an imaginary view of the spill-over crowd at my favorite pub, the Ear Inn.

I think there are reasons why I love "making" rain happen in my work. When rain comes, there is a disruption and urgency of a most innocent kind -- that's one. Also, it's an excuse to unify the figures and geometric shapes of the umbrellas with a soft diagonal bias. And maybe a nostalgia for the days when I prayed for it to rain all day. Then I could be excused from the job and make the early morning call: "Hey Joe, it's raining over here. Can I stay out today?" He'd be happy to save on the payroll, since the work was almost always outside. "That's okay, John. Stay in the house. See you tomorrow." Then I would be free to hang out in my studio with a model or go to the bar and relax. Rain meant freedom.

The Thing Itself

Bradley Rubenstein — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 01:28:19 +0000

The Thing Itself Bradley Rubenstein March 10, 2012 - 20:28

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Mira Schor is a painter and writer living in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. She is the author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (Duke University Press) and the blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She is an associate teaching professor in MFA Fine Arts at Parsons The New School for Design. She is represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles and Marvelli Gallery in New York. The exhibition Mira Schor: Voice and Speech opens March 29 at Marvelli Gallery at 526 West 26th Street, 2nd floor, New York, New York, and runs through April 28.

Bradley Rubenstein: I feel that the art and the politics of the artist come together pretty seamlessly in your work, but in your most recent paintings there is more of a sense of introspection, despite the use of language, etc. They are really contemplative self-portraits. Am I far off the mark on this one?

Mira Schor: It's true. The work I've done since my mother Resia Schor died in 2006 has been deeply marked by that loss. It is an individual, private grief within a world where terrible loss is a constant, as we look at events in Syria today and around the world. Mine is a private individual loss, underpinned by larger historical forces. I'm the last of my immediate family on a family tree that my mother and sister composed in the 1990s. That piece of paper has been a major driver of the work I've done since 2007, beginning with my thought-balloon paintings. My mother remembered about eighty named or specific individuals from her family and my father's, going back to the 19th century. I counted that nearly half had perished in the Holocaust. At the bottom of the paper, at the end of this chain of human beings, my sister placed her name and birth date and mine. I feel a responsibility to all these lives, to my parents' artwork, and to the stories of their lives, which include the war and the Shoah. So this is cause for introspection, which in itself for me is a kind of joy.

At the same time, I'm a politically minded person, always drawn to oppositional ideologies and polemics. Interiority and exteriority occur sometimes in the same work, or works in a series shift from one frame to the other. I speak of two "politics": what's happening in the world, and art politics -- examining which definitions of art are hosts for different types of power. So in one painting I did last summer, a figure lies under a tree and looks at words hanging from the tree, words on time and space: "here/then" and "there/now." I was reflecting on the question posed by an e-flux book I was reading, What is Contemporary Art? I felt that the real question suggested by the book was, "Where is contemporary art?" and that the answer is that the contemporary, the now, is not here, where I am -- in the West, in the tradition of painting -- but there, in new global sites and new media. But I can only continue to paint, in the place I occupy, "here." Another painting in the series represents the same figure asleep with only the word "time" hanging from the tree, so now "time" is not just historical time or timeliness, but also the time one has on Earth to work and express -- the temporal sword of Damocles.

In another new painting, the same figure sleeps under a series of cartouches that spell out the words "the dreams of all of us." I was trying to figure out how to express in my newest work the effect of Occupy Wall Street. This gets at some of the basic problematics of political art: Do you represent? Do you illustrate? Do you perform? I already was painting these sleeping dreamers, and then I was touched by a comment made by the student of a friend, which she posted on Facebook. The student (whose name I don't know, but I'm grateful for the eloquence) wrote,"In abstraction, one might think of Occupy Wall Street as a 'Sleep-In.' What fascinates me about this particular conceptualization is that it implies using the body's faculties for repose and rest(oration) in an artistic form of activism.… The use of the shutdown of the body to attempt a shutdown of the system is not only a startling symbol (metaphor), but also a deployment of the one thing that capitalism has not yet fully infiltrated: our sleep. It metonymizes sleep with resistance."

This was such a beautiful idea. I have a lot of trouble sleeping, but love to and need to sleep; one of my favorite scenes in the movie Orlando was the long sleep from which Orlando awakens as a woman. As he sleeps on, doctors are summoned, they examine him, and finally, with great and deliberate pomp, they declare, "The Lord Orlando is sleeping." I often think of that line with longing for such an epic and transformative sleep. Meanwhile the tents and all the apparatus of sleeping at OWS was the unglamorous (and courageous) nitty-gritty basis of what they were doing and maybe what drives authorities craziest. They are (they were) lying outside at night, vulnerable, for us, and collectively they were dreaming for us.

BR: It is interesting; when we started this interview, you were talking about doing figurative work again. How do you see what you are actually doing now as being different from how you pictured it would be?

MS: It was funny to read now what I said in our earlier interview, "I can't quite envision a way to represent myself as a figure in painting."Now most of the recent paintings are inhabited by a sketchily drawn figurative avatar of self, wearing glasses. I think I couldn't imagine it because all my earlier figurative work had been pretty tightly painted one way or another, and my goal was to move toward a more painterly expression in oil paint. For example, my figurative and narrative Story paintings from the early Seventies were painted really differently than I do now; then, I literally filled gouache color into line drawings. And the body I represented at age 22 was a lot differently imagined than the one that appears in my work now: then it was that of a girl growing her sexuality; now it is a barely gendered, barely embodied person walking around, sleeping, watching, reading. Some people have read my current avatar with its blocky head and large glasses as a walking camera rather than a human figure. But, in fact, there's a chain from narrative drawings I did in childhood to the current figuration. And painting language, which remains central to my work, is in part another form of figuration, though with a certain objectivity and power derived from the power of "speech" over "voice" or embodiment.

When I started painting in oil, in the Eighties, I was as scared as any intro-painting student by the uncontrollable aspects of oil paint, the fear of "mud." At first I couldn't figure out how to achieve the freedom that I had gained using pastel and dry pigment on rice paper in my work from the early Eighties, but once I gained some control over oil, the goal has been to lose control. The process is sort of a throwback to Abstract Expressionism's ethos of "finding the painting" or of the painting as an arena for an action, though that ethos is grafted to a conceptual program. Desperation is a good motivator -- when you really feel you have nothing to lose because the painting seems so bad. A work needs at some point to become unmoored from intentionality, and the path to that is engagement with materiality, even if you have a conceptual frame.

BR: When we talked in your studio while you were working on these pieces, I mentioned Plato's Cave -- which you had already written about -- but maybe Walter Benjamin is closer to these works. He wrote about the Truth content with regard to art: "The transformation of material content into Truth content makes the loss of effect, whereby the attractiveness of the earlier dream [of Renaissance or Medieval art] diminishes decade by decade ... in which all ephemeral beauty is stripped off...." It sounds contradictory, but your paintings are both very beautiful and steeped in the arcana of painting, but they seem to be in the process of shedding a tradition of painting, getting down to the elements of what makes a painting a painting.

MS: Thanks for that perception, both parts of it, but particularly the idea that I'm shedding a tradition of painting while trying to get at the elements of what makes a painting a painting -- sounds good to me. But what you are seeing and saying is something that must be said by others than myself. What I can say is that my identity as a painter has always been caught, in a generative way, between the traditions of painting and the proclamations of the death of painting, of the object, of the individual artist, of private studio practice -- everything that has become the doxa of contemporary art.

When, in my late teens and early twenties, I first declared that the works I was doing were paintings, they were absolutely not accepted as such because the work was small, gouache on paper, figurative, and autobiographical; early on what I was doing was dismissed as illustration. This was at the tail end of the dominance of Greenbergian formalism. So right off the bat I was propelled by rejection of my claims for my work, into a place outside of "painting." Feminism clarified the underlying ideologies to me and made me understand more clearly what I had intuited before, that what I was doing was a political act, was artwork with a political valence, even when it did not have the overt markers of "political art." Then, conceptual art's use of language helped release me from a bond of admiration to the great traditions of painting and from a bond to figurative representation; it provided a portal to language as image. These shifts all took place in my earliest years as an artist.

A bit later the work was really more sculpture made of paper than painting, but I still called myself a painter. It got more complicated when I went through a phase of saying that I was a painter for whom sculpture was at the heart of my work and then that I was a conceptual artist who was a painter. But all these identifications really do exist simultaneously. I'm always bringing something from one faction or identity into the other, in ways that have generally made both sides uncomfortable and that give my paintings maybe a sense of, as Mike Minelli recently wrote, "not resting easy on the wall." Maybe that's what you are picking up on when you say I'm shedding the traditions of painting while trying to get to the heart of it.

In a number of the paintings I've done during the past year, my little avatar of self contemplates the displacement of pictorialism to other media than painting. "The Displacement of Pictorialism" was the title of a piece that was going to be a chapter in A Decade of Negative Thinking, but I never finished it. Whenever I find myself in a darkened gallery or museum space looking at a large video projection on the wall, I think of how the painting that once would have occupied this space has been displaced because it is no longer seen as a contemporary interlocutor; its physicality is cast aside, only to be replaced by a projected image on exactly the same square footage. The only change is the displacement of faith in one medium to another, not the circumstance of pictorialism. What's the diff? Or, what the fuck? I think that's why I'm so interested in the objectness of painting -- painting as a "thing." So my little figure sits under a tree and looks at two cartouches hanging from it: one says "sociality"; the other says "The space where painting was," and a heavy ball, like an overloaded wasp's nest weighing down the tree branch, contains the word "matter." Meanwhile, the painting itself is a small oil sketch/ink drawing, so it is itself barely a painting -- somewhere between an oil-assisted drawing and a cartoon.

BR: We spoke about Ad Reinhardt's cartoons and what if Reinhardt had tried to merge his passion for satirical art commentary in his cartoons, and his reductive passion for painting, into one highly contingent work. But maybe that's stretching it; you may feel that the work itself is closer to Guston in style and spirit, with a touch of Indian miniature painting, and some of Florine Stettheimer and Remedios Varo thrown in, in your diffident and studious figures. But my take is a little different: with Reinhardt and Guston there was a definite separation between text and image; I see your painting and writing concerns becoming synthesized. There isn't as great a distinction between where one begins and one ends.

MS: At this point I feel I just have to get to whatever I want to, and that means disregarding artificial distinctions imposed by others. I see that too in the way I approach writing now. For a long time I felt I had to write to a certain academic standard so that my arguments were solidly enough grounded in research and theory that they might be taken seriously in the arena I aimed them at. It was a necessary discipline at the time, but I don't feel I have to do that now. In my blog, A Year of Positive Thinking, I develop an idea in a kind of pressure-cooker method, and there's a free flow between research, politics, artworks, and some of my own photographs and drawings related to the subject at hand. I try to be as thorough as I can, but I'm working to the speed and range of the web.

Similarly, in the recent paintings I'm really speeding up the relations between theory and practice, reading and painting. A number of key paintings have been done in the following manner: In the summer I lie under my favorite tree and read books on contemporary art and theory. Usually I look for books that articulate views seemingly oppositional to my own. I thrive on the resistance they offer, though last summer, in addition, I read some writings and lectures by Philip Guston, as well as a book on his late work, and also the wonderful writings of Morton Feldman. I always keep a notebook near me when I read because I find it useful to engage in a kind of parallel thinking: reading makes me think and write, but not necessarily directly to the specific text (those annotations go directly into the margins of the book). I also have a pile of small sketchbooks, ink markers, and pencils next to me (and some chocolate chip cookies and ice tea -- as you can see, I'm describing Paradise). I sketch to the readings and against them, responding as immediately as possible to my embodied sensations as I lie there, to the text as to the unseen birds chirping loudly in the tree above me. I try to capture the sense of myself lying there, reading and thinking without regard for any kind of representational correctness, in the aim of a more important accuracy, like an internal gesture drawing of a state of mind/body. Then I spring up, run into the studio, and as quickly as I can, I transfer one of these drawings to canvas in what I call oil-assisted drawings, Then these produce the further challenge of how to keep the spontaneity of drawing intact while continuing the conversation in paintings that begin and end with oil on linen only.

BR: You've given your upcoming show at Marvelli Gallery the title Voice and Speech. I see layers of meaning in it -- voice is to speech as seeing is to looking. However, one must also master speech in order to have voice.

MS: Yes, exactly. A couple of paintings feature those words. I was inspired by an idea put forward in Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life. His theme is that there exists a knowledge that precedes theory and that retains "voice" even when "speech" attempts to subsume it. It is the same knowledge that causes the city dweller to inscribe living patterns of usage onto the fixed grid of the planned city; it's the knowledge of the folkloric, of craft. He writes, "In turn, 'the voice' will also insinuate itself into the text as a mark or a trace, an effect of a metonymy of the body...a transitory figure, an indiscreet ghost, a 'pagan' or 'wild' reminiscence in the scriptural economy, a disturbing sound from a different tradition, and a pre-text for interminable interpretive productions."

I may be creatively misreading de Certeau -- other writers from this period reverse the meaning, giving "speech" the meaning I'm giving to "voice" -- but "voice" and "speech" are what I do: the feminist project of bringing the "voice" of living inside a woman's body with a mind into the "speech" of art, as co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G with Susan Bee giving visual artists a public space in which to participate in "speech," as a writer bridging the gap between the "voice" of painting and the "speech" of art theory, as a painter of language bridging the gap between two systems of knowledge and returning "speech" to "voice." I'm always seeking to valorize "voice" while giving "speech" to "voice."

BR: I am looking forward to seeing your show. I am sure you are too. I think that seeing your new pieces is going to be quite an event, especially in New York, at a moment when painting, serious painting, is really needed. Any thoughts?

MS: It feels like an interesting moment for me to have this opportunity to show my work, when the art world may be reconsidering or reflecting on excess, and values may be shifting. I hope my work's mix of materiality and thought, interiority and politics, has an emotion that is tuned to the time.

I'm looking forward to installing the show. The works are small, and the space is imposing, with long walls and high ceilings, so right now I'm thinking about how to present the individual paintings while establishing visual rhythm and narrative structure. My work always has a narrative and discursive aspect, so I'm interested in my shows having an underlying narrative, though not at all an overt one, but one that somehow is communicated to the viewer as a subtext that may be intuited: each painting is an individual work, and represents a thought, yet is part of a larger thread of thought.

In this group of work there are a few major themes or progressions along an idea: the idea of contemporary art, painting and theory; the idea of time; the idea of the dream of social change. There are a couple of connections I want to make to slightly older paintings of individual words. Having some sense of sequencing and chronology matters, though it's possible that a less narrative or more metonymic sequencing will work best in the space.

But I'm most interested in the narrative I don't know about yet, in what will become apparent when the work is up. I'm interested in what the paintings will tell me about what the next paintings will be. The world and my daily life will always suggest "subjects," but the works themselves suggest directions in investigating painting itself.

The Thing Itself

Bradley Rubenstein — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:28:31 +0000

The Thing Itself Bradley Rubenstein December 30, 2011 - 10:28

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Mira Schor is a painter and writer living in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. She is the author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (Duke University Press) and the blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She is an associate teaching professor in MFA Fine Arts at Parsons The New School for Design. She is represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles and Marvelli Gallery in New York City where she will have a one-person exhibition in March 2012.

Bradley Rubenstein: You grew up in New York City. Your mother was an artist; your father was an artist; you were exposed to art at an early age, both at home and in the museums. Can you remember when you decided that you were going to be an artist?

Mira Schor: The precise moment was during a 19th-century art history class in college. I majored in art history at NYU. The professor was saying something like, "Monet wanted to..." and I thought, "How do you know what Monet wanted?" I realized then and there that I identified with the "wrong" side of the slide projector: the artist, not the art historian. So that career choice fell away, and the only one that was left was to be an artist. I had shown interest and talent for drawing, painting, and sculpture all through my childhood. I was always serious about it and worked rather like I do now, in series, in which I would work a subject, form, or style until I was bored with it. I did many very lively little clay figurines when I was about ten. I was influenced by the Ashanti weights and pre-Columbian art my parents had collected. For a while in my teens I thought I wanted to be a fashion designer, so I filled sketchbooks with ink and wash designs, imitating the style of the New York Times "Women's Page" fashion reporting, which was all done with ink sketches in those days. I got pretty good at it, but when it came time to think of designing as a career, I realized I just liked to draw (and to own beautiful clothes!) but wasn't interested in learning how to actually make clothes.

I received encouragement from my parents and a lot of exposure to art through their work and their love of art. I was brought up in art and to some extent in the art world. I sensed then that there was a distinction, and I still operate under the terms of that distinction today. Making art and thinking about art, art ideas, art history -- that's one thing. The art world and career -- that's another.

On the door of my father and mother's small studio in our apartment in New York City is an antique metal shield on which my father had painted in oil the tools of the goldsmith's trade, a saw and hammer. The tale of the goldsmith's floor was one of the foundational metaphors of our family: In the workshop of a goldsmith, gold dust is husbanded carefully, but it sifts into cracks in the floorboards. When the goldsmith moves, the floor is burned to recover the accumulated gold mass. My parents, Ilya and Resia Schor, would often say, "We have gold on the floor, and we don't know how to pick it up." That can be understood as a metaphor for the precarious finances, career disappointments, and the frustrations of creating something fine and not being able to capitalize on it into material prosperity, which are all part of an artist's life and were certainly part of what I learned as the daughter of artists. But most importantly, this story speaks of artwork that is not concerned with commercial exploitation. My parents often did work on commissions, from private collectors or religious institutions, but they each pursued the truth of the work rather than its marketability; indeed, they could never figure out how to mass-produce or design for mass consumption, or how to market themselves and their biographies, even though necessity often indicated that they should try to do so.

On the other hand, we did live in a house filled with treasures. When my father would finish one of his Torah Crowns, for example, he would come out of the studio wearing the human-sized, bell-laden crown on his head, its bells tinkling. He had a remarkable face with high cheekbones and wildly upslanted eyes that would be alight with joy at his wondrous creation. I had seen the work made; the work had deep religious meaning, and it was an art object filled with joy and generous with visual and narrative pleasure that even a child could enjoy and appreciate. What a wonderful introduction to art and art making!

I think I was always going to be an artist, but I still had to make the decision to be an artist for myself and take the consequences.

BR: What was the most significant experience you had at CalArts? Looking back, do you think your experiences there really defined how you approached being an artist?

MS: CalArts was the most significant experience I had at CalArts! The total atmosphere of that school at that time in the L.A. of that time. There was a unique multiplicity and parity of avant-garde positions all freely available and in the air. I had a dual experience at CalArts, and both aspects of it are equally important and deeply formative. I was in the Feminist Art Program my first year, and that was certainly the single most important experience in terms of determining much of my political involvements and critical focus since. But I am also very influenced by the Fluxus movement and the conceptual art movement that, with their anti-object and anti-market orientation, were very strong at CalArts. People like Allan Kaprow, Emmett Williams, Alison Knowles, Simone Forti, and John Baldessari taught there. I also had a wonderful advisor, the sculptor Stephan Von Huene, whom I worked with after I left the program. He was then doing sound sculptures that were beautifully crafted wood music-making machines with piano roll type of movements. He was really supportive of the intimate personal revelation I was trying to put into my small gouaches. One didn’t necessarily have to work with each artist; they gave a “flavor” to the entire institution. You could pick up the Fluxus ethos on the way to lunch, passing Simone Forti doing something blindfolded in a hallway. Their conceptual yet playful and somehow whimsical attitude toward art made a great impact on my work.

There was a goofy spirit at CalArts then that is best expressed in Pee-Wee's Playhouse -- subversive but in a sweet, slightly anarchic rather than nihilistic manner. Paul Reubens, then Paul Reubenfeld, was at CalArts at the time I was there. Later the school became more earnest about conceptualism, more dogmatic about theory, and ever more savvy in terms of careerism, as the times changed in those directions and the history of the school was rewritten to make the success of some of my contemporaries, such as David Salle, seem like manifest destiny. And, surprise, surprise, the very existence of the Feminist Art Program was erased almost totally until, after the Northridge earthquake, a student was assigned to go over some books that were being junked. Lo and behold, she found copies of the catalogue for the Womanhouse project from 1972 about to be discarded. Students researched the existence of the program and organized a major conference. Now, the history is surely forgotten all over again.

BR: Your working method has changed a lot since then. You are concerned with issues such as the materials and craft of painting … also the idea of tradition and the history of art. What changed your direction or focus?

MS: I am not sure that my working method has changed as much as the way my work looks. If you look at one of my "story" paintings from CalArts and a recent painting of the word "trace," you might wonder if the same person did it. The first is a narrative painting in which a personal story is set out through self-figuration. The scene is set in a landscape whose forms are distillations of landscape and nature forms but whose forms are also related to the way the figure is drawn. I was skinny, and I liked to paint skinny cypress trees and pointy cacti. The second is of a word retraced a few times on a flat white ground, but basic characteristics of form and material are there in both: narrative, whether depicted or literally written; small scale; water-based media; and a certain way of using line. It is like the gloves are different, but the hand is the same.

There has always been a strong narrative and discursive impulse to the work. I first started using language as image in my work at CalArts. The language was more poetic then; I chose words I thought were beautiful. Later the language was autobiographical. Now the words are less personal and, in a sense, I let them choose me. I just wait for the right ones.

I was always interested in tradition and art history. I think that what has changed is only the illusion that I understand more than I did before. But I've thought that at every stage of the game. The biggest change is perhaps in what oil paint can do.

BR: The images of words or phrases that you paint seem perfectly logical to me. You write, you paint, you paint what you write. But your earlier works, which I also like, for example, "the penis paintings," are more image-oriented, figurative. Did writing and editing M/E/A/N/I/N/G have an impact on your painting?

MS: I'm glad that my painting of language seems logical to you! You know the typical conversation: "What do you do?" "I'm a painter." "Oh, what kind of paintings do you do?" (abstract or realist, figure or landscape?) "I paint language." "…"

I had used language as image before I ever wrote about art, and at the same time, the critical writing and editing had a great impact on the image paintings you’re talking about. The penis paintings were done at the same time as I was researching and writing "Representations of the Penis." At this same time, a book review piece I wrote called "Researching Visual Pleasure," in which I reviewed Barnett Newman's Collected Writings, was simultaneous with and instrumental in my beginning to simplify my painting surfaces toward a flatter surface. This is also the moment when I began to shift from representational images to handwriting as the image.

The biggest impact writing as a process had on the work is that I learned that writing must be edited. The need for editing is imbricated in the text itself and springs out at you even if you didn't intend to do it. All you need is to set a text aside for a week, and what needs to be done to it jumps off the page. The media I had painted in and worked with until that point were immediate and didn't allow for much reworking: gouache, dry pigment on paper. But finally by the early '80s, I was pushing gouache to its limits, doing very large gouaches on 36" x 72" rice paper sheets and painting it to the limits of its capacity for impasto. The fragility of paper and the various media I used were no longer a proper metaphor for self, so finally oil, which I had avoided up until that time, was the necessary medium. I made my way into it through about a year of pushing the sculptural aspects of the paper objects I had been working on. Then I started to paint in oil, and I had started writing and editing at the same time. I found that writing's organic necessity for editing gave me the patience and courage to use the capacity for alteration that is unique to oil. So just in the sense of process, my writing and doing M/E/A/N/I/N/G led to my ability to engage with oil.

The "penis" paintings were part of the last works that contained recognizable figural imagery. I sometimes miss having that kind of representation in my work, but I worked through those embodied representations over about seven years and moved on. The penis/ear/breast/language/punctuation mark paintings were part of a time when I was learning a lot about psychoanalytic theory and when the body was the arena for political discord, over abortion and AIDS. Gender was topic A. I am not convinced of any similar subject at the moment -- or any that would take the form of a figurational representation.

You can't imagine the shit I had to deal with, doing those penis paintings. People would read all their inner conflicts about masculinity and femininity into the paintings but never give the paintings or me credit for provoking such strong emotions. I experienced the downside of using controversial imagery; some people get famous, I just got told I was doing something wrong. The work would remind someone of how much they hated their father, and then they would tell me it wasn't well painted. And they were just looking at a slide! On the other hand, I really had fun seeing men roll their eyes back when I would talk about "my penis paintings." A woman saying "my penis," that really got people going, but actually I felt very happy and optimistic when I did that work, evidently characteristics that I ascribed quite positively to masculinity!

I see certain things in popular culture that I might want to interact with, things that relate to my "story" paintings -- the spiky forms of some of the strange dark cartoons on afternoon TV or something like that. It seems that every few years or so the art world produces another woman artist doing small autobiographical personal paintings with a surrealist touch. I moved on from that kind of work, so I tend to think of it as a stage. I don't feel the same need to put myself physically into a painting as I did then. My work doesn't serve the same purpose for me. Then it was necessary for me to use my art to tell people what was going on in my life. The work was a form of ventriloquism. Now the work is the work. It is not so personal, or, rather, what is personal has changed. I can't quite envision a way to represent myself as a figure in painting. And I don't really see myself doing that or going back to the tight painting techniques that calls for. Right now I want to move toward a looser, wilder, more entropic approach to painting.

BR: I view art making as an essentially social, not political, activity. As I see it, social is how you function in the world with other people, political is how you function in the world with other people to get them to do what you want.

MS: That does make political sound sinister. Actually I think all art has political content or valence, whether intentional or not. I think of my work as political not because I want people to do what I want, but because it is done in response to the political content of other art, and by that I include, for example, the political meaning of the pure aesthetics of modernism. I find it possible to get sustenance from art for its "purely" aesthetic qualities and at the same time to function in art with a political perspective.

BR: You published your second book with Susan Bee, M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology ofArtists' Writings, Theory, and Criticism. What else are you working on besides your painting?

MS: I'm working on the book I mentioned and on a whole group of paintings that are intimately related to the book, just as the book is intimately related to my painting. I've written about half, but the writing has been extremely difficult, very slow and tortuous. I'm trying to write differently than before, more personally, and with a much broader theme -- two themes really, painting and the role of the past in an ahistorical time. I've written one chapter essay called "Modest Painting," and I'm working on a really ambitious essay that examines the affectlessness chosen by much contemporary art and embodied in some familiar visual strategies, like blurring, by tracking these back to Gerhard Richter and then tracking the sources of his aesthetic decisions in the Holocaust and the Second World War. One of my works on paper related to this essay is a gray blurred text that "says," "Why does the Past always have to be grey and out of focus?"

BR: When I first moved to New York in the mid-'90s I thought it was a really great time and environment -- there was no style or movement to follow, the money was pretty much gone, and galleries opened and closed pretty quickly. The celebrity-ness of the '80s was kind of out of vogue for a while, and suddenly it seemed that you could try to do anything you wanted. You really anticipated that way of thinking in your career, allowing yourself to change style, developing other aspects such as teaching and writing. Was this something you set out to do from the beginning, or was it just the "zeitgeist," like it was for me?

MS: I never have had the belief in the art world that it demands. The art world I was brought up in had its careerists and even its youthful stars, but nothing like the 1980s commodity culture notion of career, professionalism, big money. Anyway, I had a run of beginner's luck in the early '80s with a couple of shows, and then all of a sudden I didn't have a gallery, and a friend of mine said, "Now you can do anything you want because no one is looking at you." The rhetoric of Western individualism is that the artist does what he wants, but often artists lose sight of that, or have their sight narrowly focused on what they think the art world wants. I thought that I already was doing what I liked, but it is true that my dealer had liked to think of me as someone doing quaint mystical landscapes, whereas I wanted to pursue the sculpture and was going back to the more feminist aspect of my work. So my friend's advice was very good, and I really did go through a lot of changes in the next few years. M/E/A/N/I/N/G was the biggest other thing I did, and that was both against the zeitgeist of the great big hype art world of the '80s and part of the zeitgeist of the interest and excitement around critical theory in the '80s. Susan and I could do it because we had nothing to lose; we weren't interested in wielding power or in commodifying our critique or in growing into an institution. We also had the tradition of small magazines and poetry journals behind us.

BR: This year has gotten off to a difficult start, and I understand that your older sister, Naomi Schor, died suddenly in December, but what are your plans for the coming months?

MS: I want to finish writing the expository text of the book and then develop the presentation of its visual content. I want it to have a high visual quotient. I'd like to produce it in several incarnations, from straight text with pictures, to an artist's book of the drawings of elements of the text, to a CD with enhanced visuals including video clips.

After September 11th, people wanted to know if it would affect my work, and I felt that my work was already about loss. But the death of my sister has made me question art making in a more profound way. At the moment, human relations seem more important. But I have begun to get back to work. She had wanted a painting of mine in which the word “joy” is painted with a very gritty, fleshy, and shitty-brown paint, but it was in fact the last painting of a larger multi-canvas installation, so I substituted another joy painting. Now I am painting the word joy in as dark and contingent a manner as possible. That is the only way I can think of to re-enter art making after the loss of such a primal figure in my life.

Here Are the Young Men

Bradley Rubenstein — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:08:24 +0000

Here Are the Young Men Bradley Rubenstein October 4, 2011 - 12:08

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art conversation

Bradley Rubenstein: Let's start with the most obvious questions first. Seattle is, from my point of view, way out there. I've known a couple of museum curators who moved there specifically because it was, to quote one of them, "not a suburb of New York." How relevant is that to you? You definitely have a thing going on there -- your work, your gallery, your whole approach to what an art world is -- that is different than here or even, say, London or whatnot. There is a fuck-you-this-is-what-we-do thing going on.

Robert Yoder: Yeah, we do what we have to do, but so would anyone with a brain and a back. There is always this haunting image of Seattle being the last vestige of the Wild West, but I think that is romanticizing something that may not exist. My favorite description is “We're a Town that Thinks It's a City.”We don't have hundreds of galleries and dozens of museums to feed our individual needs, so we find what we want, and if we can't find it, we make it. I'm sure that happens in other cities. I've never thought of Seattle as being any different than anywhere else I've lived -- at least not in a way that affects my work. As I've gotten older, my approach has become more of a fuck-you, but that is probably because at the end of the day, there is just not that much to lose, but so much to gain.

BR: Obviously your work reflects that kind of attitude! Let's go back a little bit. Tell me a little about your background.

RY: Well, I was born and raised in Virginia -- southern Virginia, practically North Carolina. I moved to Seattle for graduate school and stayed. School was always about craftsmanship. My BFA was in metalwork/jewelry, and the MFA was in fibers. Both allowed me to make sculpture in ways the sculpture departments weren't interested in. Those classes really instilled an appreciation for detail and the power of material. That was twenty-six years ago.

In the early '90s, I got really sick, had some surgery, and followed up with radiation treatments. That period was pretty awful, but I did gain a lot from it. It slowed me down, and I started paying attention to things. I had the sense I was just outside my body. That feeling is kinda with me at all times now -- just some endless disconnection.

(right: "Dry Ship," 2010, collage, 12 x 9.5 inches)

BR: That is relevant background material. That is exactly the way I would describe your work: being outside your body. You paint and collage things on paper. The paintings are related to bruises, skin, etc., and the very nature of collage is surgical. Do you see your work as being autobiographical?

RY: There is some weird notion of anonymity that I'm trying to maintain. I'm pretty withholding, and my disconnection lets it feel natural. (Call the shrink now.) I guess I don't purposefully think in terms of autobiography, although there have been a few veiled self-portraits along the way. For me they seem more like an extension that has a better grasp on nuance and blatancy. I think of the paintings as if they could yield under slow and steady pressure, sucking in your hand, then arm, then whatever else fits. The imagery forms, only to fall back. This back and forth area of being and not quite being is the address for my indifference. Seems too simple to say, "I pour my soul into them," or some other bullshit. When I'm painting I feel like I'm pulling things out more than pouring in.

Thinking in terms of skin and bruises, well, skin and bruises are just plain sexy, and all the paintings have an undercurrent of sex in them. The skin is the first contact, and the next thing you know, you're getting sucked in. The paintings are usually about specific people I know, but it is just barely them. Like when I paint my friend Carl, I know he has a scar, so I paint the scar. I can see it, so it becomes a portrait of Carl. Nobody else can see it, but should that matter? The collages are similar but rarely about anyone in particular. They tend to be more about covering things, hiding things. The surgical aspect in them is purely editing, it relates back to the tedious (read: anal) hand work from my craft education.

BR: You make the work seem connected in a way that I hadn't seen at first. I saw the paintings as being something that was added on to, and the collage work as something that things were taken away from, both getting to a point, but by different paths. It is interesting that the element of craft is so integral to both processes. We can come back to this in a minute, but I want to bring in another aspect of your work, which is the gallery. Do you see that as relating to your work, or is it something else entirely? You are very specific with your shows, and how you present the work is very precise. The context, the catalogs you do -- all that becomes important.

RY: The gallery was a long time coming; I had been thinking about it for maybe five or six years before it happened. I think the economic collapse was just the thing I needed to push me. There was a lot of support from friends, especially from my partner George, and from Charlie from Ambach & Rice (LA). I thought running a low-maintenance gallery would create some perfect diversion that hopefully a few like-minded types would enjoy. I'm humbled by the relative success in the short time it has been open, and that success has pushed me to work harder at the shows. I don't think it relates to my paintings except that I'm a happier person, and that probably spills into the studio somehow.

I couple the artists in each show because I see some tenuous connection between their work and then just let them do what they want. Sometimes I just want certain things the artists create, like just their drawings. I have to have slight control with the show because of the logistics of exhibiting in my living room, so sometimes the really big stuff just can't show. Mike Simi has a gigantic mechanical sock puppet that is made from those arms that build cars. It's goofy funny and would just crash through to my basement -- as if it would even fit through the front door.

Anyhow, the show design has to fit the work, or I should say, has to fit my idea of the work. One of the hard things for an artist is to give up control and let someone else hang the work. I resisted for a long time myself. I finally got it one day, and it was a revelation. When you let someone else hang it -- too high or too low or in the corner or whatever -- you get the opportunity to see your work new again, maybe even see what a stranger sees in it. It's not being evil or controlling, but I do think it is important to do this to artists, especially younger ones who are always dead-set on the proper way and order to hang their pictures.

The catalogs are important for the artists so that they have some written record of the show. A written essay by a learned person about your work isn't something you get everyday; these things are important. I think a lot of what I'm doing with the gallery is the fantasy stuff I always wished my galleries did. Keeping with my withholding tendencies, the gallery website is pretty minimal: no résumés, no endless thumbnails of every artwork, just an image, some text, a news page, and a contactpage. The Facebook page has more if you want it, and besides, everyone knows how to Google an artist.

BR: In a lot of ways all this ties together, I think, to your work. It shows a level of interest in how art is created and also presented -- very detail-oriented -- which I think is reflected in your paintings and collage works. It also seems like you must absorb a lot of information from working closely with all of the artists and writers with whom you end up working. Is this at all true?

RY: It is, and I do absorb a lot, but not only from the artist and writers. Lately I've noticed I'm paying attention to things I never really cared about. Once, when I was in Wyoming a few years ago, the sunrise on the mountains did this thing that was completely the opposite of everything I had learned about atmospheric perspective. It was unfuckingbelievable. Since then, I just let go and let whatever happens, happen. When an artist lets me see something in myself that I never knew had been there all along, well, THAT is the shit. That moment is great. That is when this whole new gate opens and so many things make sense.

(right: "Head On," 2010, collage, 17 x 8 inches)

BR: Do you see your work coming from any specific historical thread? Do you have any specific affinities or influences from past art that you can point to?

RY: Not with any clarity; I have favorite artists but they tend to make very different work than I do. When I was a kid I saw my first Duane Hanson, and I still remember how it creeped me out, but I couldn't stop looking at it. Possibly because it was a full-on naked dude, but probably because it was so unlike anything I had been raised to think of as Art. Later in 1982, the Good as Gold show at the Renwick Gallery in D.C. affirmed the fact that low or base materials can be equally as important and beautiful. I'm glad I got to see those shows at those times; something probably sank in from them.

BR: You have a show coming up next month in New York City.

RY: Yes, the show will be at Frosch&Portmann in the Lower East Side and will be up the month of November. Pulse in Miami will also feature new work. There will be several oils on panel and some collages. I'm most excited about some combinations that introduce relief -- basically painting on a shelf. It is a stretch to call it sculpture, but it is working in that direction.

BR: Can we get a little preview of what the new work is all about?

RY: Well, it seems I'm always thinking about loss and how that crushing melancholy just seeps into every action and thought. So these paintings are depressed; they have a gloomy libido that is ready for failure. The show title is Beautiful William, which I totally stole from a Handsome Family song about a guy who goes missing. I've been listening to a lot of shoegazer music lately, and all that downbeat has me thinking of the paintings as sadcore.

BR: Sounds ominous. But we can't say we weren't warned.