Cora Cohen

Cohen, Cora (2011)
Transcript of a video recording of “Living Together,” a lecture by Cora Cohen at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as part of their Visiting Lecture Series

Intro: Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. My name is Nick Ostoff, I'm the visiting artist assistant and a graduate student. Before I introduce Cora Cohen, I'm going to ask her to come and say a few words.

Cora Cohen received her B.A. and M.A. from Bennington College in Vermont. She has taught at various schools in the United States and abroad. In recent years, she has been a guest lecturer at the Duke Arts Academy, the University School of the Arts in New York, Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, and the New York Studio School. Cohen's works have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Swedish State Art Council in Stockholm, the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, and the Ulla and Heiner Petszch Collection in Berlin. Michael Steinberg Fine Arts New York, Jason McCoy Gallery in New York, and Marcus Winter Gallery in Berlin have presented solo exhibitions of her works. In June 2001, the solo exhibition of her Altered X-Rays, a complex and continually evolving project from the early 90s, was held at the Field Institute in Hombroich, Germany. So now, without further ado, please welcome Cora Cohen.

CC: Thank you. Thanks very much, and thanks for all your help today. The title of this talk is Living Together, and can everyone hear me okay? And that's related to Roland Barthes, and I'll just read a little bit. And actually, I'll put a painting on so the rest of you can look at it while I read.

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During his 1977 lectures, Barthes applied himself to clear a path to a living-together, probably utopian fantasy of society. He suggests a society that would allow everyone to live according to one's own rhythm inside the community, but without being based on an extreme solitude for each individual, or an ecstatic mysticism, or a pathological eulogy of dereliction. A society that wouldn't be based on the extreme alienation of individuals by a power, whatever its form, fixing strict rhythms.

The question that is problematic in painting after formalism, minimalism, and conceptualism informs my investigation of abstraction. In the wake of modernism's ascendancy, I investigate abstractions in ways that are based on, and also depart from, modernist terms. Art is about, and can be about, and is about, I think at its best, propositions. Even when modernist, it has the possibility to be about beginnings and not endings.

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The first painting I showed was a very large painting called Terrain Vague, and this is a painting called Counter Discourse, that's about this size.

I looked at some paintings last week. The artist wanted me to say something. The painting the artist did not like was the one I was most able to look at and become involved in seeing. When I asked why, I said because it's spatially uncharted. She said, the others are about mapping. I thought, why make a painting about mapping? A painting can't be about something, and why make a painting showing the viewer where to go?

So I'm interested in making art that offers space in which to roam around, space in which to get lost, an uncharted space where time can be wasted, an art in which two opposing forces or several contradictory ways of thinking can coexist. I'm against art that tries to control how the viewer sees the work, where the artist lays down laws about what art should be, thereby limiting the participation and autonomy of the viewer. Some examples I can think of offhand are Koons and Damien Hirst.

I'm also, I was going to talk for a minute. I thought it might be fun to, like, form this—like, I talk a while, and then I stop, and then I see if there are any questions. So let's see how that can work in this situation.

In this painting and the one before, presence and absence change places. There's always the possibility of interesting painting, no matter what style the artist chooses, but I think we must choose and have an individual or personal way of working through the medium. Looking at a work of art by an artist, I wonder, what is it that distinguishes this work from earlier work of its type, and is there enough distinction? I am most interested in work that's medium-specific.

The following works I made during a period in which I lived inside as much as possible…

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…and perhaps as a consequence, I became involved in the possibilities of interior space, yet I attempted to make works that provided an open vista.

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These paintings allowed my sense of interiority and the world to remain vast. This one's about 26 by 23…

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…and this next group is 36 by 38, and they're all from 2000, around 2002.

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I'm interested in art that does not cover over the underside of life. Frances Bacon is a big hero of mine.

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So is early Malevich. So is, I don't have a slide of her work, but I'm sure everyone knows it, Dana Schutz.

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These are some photographs I took in the subway of New York…

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…of unoccupied, closed-down spaces.

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This is between the museum and the school here, of a homeless person.

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Garbage on the river in New York.

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Goya.

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And Mozartstrasse in Cologne, in Germany, where I often go and where I live. The reverence for art and culture is really profound and intense, yet on this street, that marker—the street's called Mozartstrasse—marks people who were tortured by the German police.

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This is an earlier painting of mine called The Mob Within the Heart, which was also the title of the exhibition.

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That's the painting in the opening of the exhibition. And I'll talk a little more about Cologne and Germany in a second, or eventually.

I'm interested in an art in which presence refers to absence.

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It's a photograph I took in Brussels a while ago.

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Rachel Whiteread.

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And this is from a piece, I think the show is still on, in New York. It's by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation. It's a video. A lot of the piece is about a utopia, a dystopia. A lot of the piece is about language. In this snippet, it's about vocabulary. It's science fiction-y, about the future, and about people having a language ration. That's what this section is about. The language ration is that you can use up your amount of words. No matter the language, you can't say those words anymore. So, the narrator says, “His lips would not make the word.” This is the word for egg. “He felt his brain race, scanning for alternatives. Give me two edible ovals.”

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Andreas Gurski.

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And this is painter Richard Aldrich. Sometimes I feel it's a little too smart for me. But his last show, it may still be on, is really the best I've seen. He says that he thinks of his paintings all as props in the sense of their own interior specificity in relation to outward meaning or function. That's like a situation of incongruence. Most of us with a kind of interior studio practice can relate to that, because working on one painting is about one thing, and then when it goes out into the world, relating to other works, it takes on another connotation. We can't control the meaning afterward. We think we can while working.

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This is Tony Smith, Die.

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And this is an Altered X-ray of mine. My Altered X-rays consist of X-ray and MRI films of strangers, friends, and colleagues that I've responded to with paint, chemicals, color, and physical interventions. They serve as elegies for those past, and act as reminders of our own vulnerability and mortality.

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This is one called Double.

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They're 14 by 7, I believe. When you put them together, they're whatever. 14 inches high and a little… They're generally 14 by 7, but not all the same.

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This is an installation of them in Leipzig. I put these installation shots in because it's different seeing work outside the place you made it. It also gives the artist a chance to reconvene a process of thinking about the work and understand better what one wants to do or not in the future.

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This is from the 2011 first solo show of these Altered X-Rays. In a utopian, Menil-type setting between Düsseldorf and Cologne that combines living, nature, art, feeling, and making.

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That's the place.

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That was the opening.

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This is a painting called Strange Fruit. It's a very small painting. Barry Schwabsky pointed out that the more time you spend with my paintings, the more chance a painting becomes a space and not just a surface. The less significant the imagistic elements seem, the more involving is the experience of viewing the painting.

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So, questions? Ideas?

Aud: The X-rays, altered X-rays, the ones you show were set against windows, exteriors, so it's questionable how they're lit. Are we seeing both transparency aspects and light from the inside and surface? Is that how it's meant to be read?

CC: Yes. Some of them are very specifically with that in mind, most are not. Sometimes people want to show them that way. Some operate really well from both sides, some don't. If on windows with an outside part, you get mileage if it operates well two-sided. Some I hang are for two sides. About illumination: people who have them in their homes work with them the best they can. Sometimes that's good, sometimes not. Paintings aren't the same in all lights; they're more mutable than certain paintings.

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This is a Joseph Beuys drawing. He was involved in movies and said: if you want to change your work, change yourself. When you change yourself, you change your relationship to society.

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This is another Beuys drawing.

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This is a painting of mine called Portrait of the Artist. I brought up Beuys because I believe what makes work interesting and relevant is linked to social decisions we make, communication, thinking processes, and how we relate to people in the world, particularly in this era of globalization. How I live informs how I make my paintings.

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This is a Minoan pot.

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This is Nuremberg Parade Ground.

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This is a piece by Carol Szymanski, an artist who worked most of her life in the high end of the financial market and in banking. Her work is informed by that.

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This is just a picture I took of Cologne, the Rhine. And Cologne's a place that's very specific to itself. The devastation of World War II and the fact that the capital of Germany has exited now from that region and gone to Berlin. And the river itself has really informed the whole culture there.

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This is a sculpture by a friend of mine, Dan Asher, who makes his pieces by, he makes a sculpture, a conventional sculpture of a person or something, and then he drops them on the floor and they shatter and then he pastes them back together. So part of the point I'm interested in in this work and in other work that I'll show right now is, aside from how, from the idea of how we live can inform what we make…

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…this is Fautrier, … also the sense and the notion and the visual being of formlessness, of things being non-hierarchical.

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That's Fontana.

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And I do think a lot of his…

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…Fontana's work was important by being, you know what, not living in Europe and not being European and following his element.

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This is by Joan Waltemath, an artist who really is pretty involved in alternative ideas of art-making, and all this work that I'm showing, this work…

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…and then this next piece are all small, little, like 8 1⁄2 by 11 and they're put together and they're all based on the numbers used to construct a harmonic progression and they're titled after those. So they're based on a harmonic progression and titled that way.

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This is a Norbert Prangenberg.

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And some of these ceramic pieces started to become paintings and then he became more of a painter. I think it's kind of interesting, to go from one thing to another, but I also think that Prangenberg is a little bit more accomplished in the ceramics.

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And these are three drawings of mine about, or embodying, or relating to being on the water, feeling the water and drawing it simultaneously. Oh, like around 19 by 28, or 22 by 30, around that.

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I did them on a ship.

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This is a painting that I called—and this is from, also sometime in 2003 or so. No, more like 2006—It's a painting that I called Moon over Montana. And it's a painting, I don't know if any of you who paint like (Arlen Pier?). I just wanted to try some things and I thought, what if I did this and what if I did that and what would it look like if I did this before and I mixed this in. And I didn't really know what I was doing. And then at the end, eventually it became something that I thought was something like I had never seen before quite, though it mixed many things I'd seen before. And so I left it. This one? It's about, about 30 by 40, about. It's not big and it's not small. It's that in-between size.

Man: So what's making the stuff (dry? bright?) What do you do with it?

CC: You know, sometimes it's smooth. That's a really good question because I wanted to duplicate that and I have a really hard time. I think when things don't dry, when it's very thick and the top dries too fast, it'll crack. It's acrylic, as I'm sure you know. But that's what, and the color is not, the color in the sort of acid-green part and the color in the cracked white part is applied after. There's stuff that you can put in. You know, I had a long conversation with the people at Golden about how to make it happen, but usually if I just use too much of it, it'll happen.

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Any other, any questions? I thought you might need them.

Woman: Did you make many of these or…?

CC: I do make, I do make, I make them every once in a while and I'll show more. I don't have a normal practice. I don't make all works in one year that all look like each other. It's more that they cycle back in. Like those (cores?), I've been making a long time.

Woman: I was wondering, when you repeat, somehow you get a kind of like a technical skill of some sort and you started to really control more.

CC: Yes.

Woman: And maybe there is a kind of an interesting, sort of critical to control and some interesting how you sort of dialogue with your mind. So I was wondering that.

CC: Yes, I do.

Woman: I thought that this looked like sort of like a wonderful surprise, but there is a different way to go there. But it will be very interesting how you balance what you know and what you don't know. That's what I mean.

CC: Thank you. No, that's a compliment. Thank you. What I mean is that I don’t do six of those at once. It's not interesting to do that. So I do one and then maybe eight months later I'll do another. And they're actually not very popular in New York. They're popular in Germany. So for whatever that's worth.

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So this is another one related to it. The cracks in this one, this painting is called Contingency and Permeability, and the cracks in this one, I wanted to operate like... I wanted them to be as if they were drawing. And after I made the painting and it cracked, I used pigment and I pushed the pigment into the cracks. And, of course, some of it came out onto the rest of the surface, and then I subtracted some of that with an eraser. So I realized that I was still trying to smash together figure and ground, and make something that was neither—that was not having a figure-ground relationship, and where the figure and the ground can change faces and have, like—there's a kind of contradictory ordering.

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And this is another way that I was trying to make a painting that at first I couldn't really understand. And this is kind of why… this is… the way that this operates is also part of my interest in art, where he defines the neutral as something that dodges a paradigm. Where in linguistic discourse, the paradigm of the system is based on an opposition between two virtual terms. And the mechanism of the conflict is to lead the individual to choose one term or the other as… to privilege one over the other.

And according to Marx, and it's kind of a nice idea in relation to painting: the neutral then stands as a third structural term that annihilates this implacable binarism of the paradigm. And the neutral occurs from the cancellation of the opposition in the paradigm.

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MAN: So do these go well in New York? Are these accepted more in New York than the other paintings that you've done? I mean, what is it that they, I don't know, I guess...

CC: Yeah, a little bit more.

MAN: Like, is there a marketable sense to this, where there is a body of work and you're doing it for a certain...

CC: Well, you could do that. I could do that, but... I mean, one can do that, and there are people who do that. I just make what I make, and then whatever happens, happens. But there is a kind of... It's predictable. But since I like making what I'm showing you, I like making everything. Everything I'm showing you, I like making. So I just make what I make and take my chances. But yes, it's predictable. I think, I'm sure that it's regionally predictable.

This is the same as—not the same as, but it's related to—you go to Boston, you're going to see Manets of Snow, or Monets of Snow. You go to Florida, you'll see a different kind of Manet. People like to have some part of their world reflected back, I think. It's the same as rich people who have no taste, who buy paintings of their ships for their mantelpieces. There's some of that that goes on. I don't know, I'm not into marketing, so I don't know.

WOMAN: That's very cool. Is this a living room, or something? It looks like a living room. This is cardboard. This is linen. Is that primed?

CC: This is linen, and it is primed. And this is linen, and it's primed. It's not painted. However, in this one... Do you see how there's a little bit of light-ish in the center? That's because something was there that I took away. So, it's not like it's pure starch-primed linen ground. All the stuff that goes on can change the ground. I use [unintelligible.] I use plastic. I mean, I have used rabbit skin glue. Because I'm saying this one, I'm using water-based, so for what I want, I don't use rabbit skin glue.

MAN: The screen here has a pattern in it. It's a defective screen. And the first two pieces you brought up, I assume you [unintelligible. brought cardboard?]. But it's the screen that extends past. I don't know if you can see it.

CC: I did see it when we were testing it. But I was told it's the screen.

MAN: Before, your comments in regards to your making a [unintelligible. Commission? Opposition?] for the previous painting, could you talk about the Marx comment or the Marx paradigm in relation to the painting?

CC: In relationship to the painting?

MAN: The violation of the paradigm. In the painting.

CC: Oh. Well, I meant it in relation to the... That it's... I find that most interesting work doesn't have a kind of hierarchy within the painting, that there isn't, like, the figure on top of the ground, for example—that the figure and the ground can... What's absent can become present, and what's... In gross terms, like, it's...

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More true in this one, where... And I don't know how much it comes through in the slide, but that space in the center could be the subject or not. It could be the figure or not. And so it doesn't... These paintings aren't stable, and that's as far as—like saying, this is the figure or this is the ground. Does that...?

MAN: How about the spray? I can see the figure / ground, with the linen and the white paint. What does it... What does the spray do in relation to that figure / ground relation?

CC: Well, the spray in this one, even though it didn't do it literally, the way it worked, it seemed to... I just thought I'd try it, and I had an idea of making it a little bit more... A lot of the stuff in this painting is actually because junk got embedded in it, so I thought I'd go with a little more junk, and the spray has to do with going with a little more of our… quotidian existence. There's spray everywhere, you know, spray paint. And what happens in this is that when I sprayed it, it got there in a certain way where it seems to go under the white. It never was under the white, but it's just it's also... I controlled that part by wiping off part of the white, so that's how the spray got there.

WOMAN: [Unintelligible]

CC: Yeah, it's not a good title. It's called Orange Spray.

[LAUGHTER]

MAN: So you were adding, like, cultural junk to the piece, and already had a little gunk and stuff.

CC: Yeah.

MAN: Junk junk. But it seems to me that that's part of the aesthetic, right? I'm clearly reminded of photographs you took of the no-longer-used or occupied transit stations in the New York subway. It's like one of those... There was a maximum model breakdown, but there's something interesting in that breakdown.

CC: Well, yeah, I mean, I think that spaces that you don't... that are sort of overlooked are very interesting because we're not completely familiar with them. It's the same as, like, you don't see your favorite painting, but they moved it so you see it differently. You know, and all this stuff that's around that we don't really... ..that I don't always see sometimes is, like, things you walk around in the world of, but other things that are sort of like a snippet of something where I was going by on the subway and I saw those unused subway stations. I, like, did the trip again so I could catch them. So I think that's because they have a certain quality of being fresh, even if they're old and dirty.

MAN: This frame, this piece, seems to me like you reinterjected yourself in this [GARBLED].

CC: Oh. That could be, I don't know.

MAN: It's not, like, found graffiti.

CC: No, no. But graffiti is also about, you know, Kilroy is here, was here. You know, graffiti is a lot about, hey, I'm me and I'm putting my mark there. I mean, but it is... You know, it's like a quote, but it's also me.

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CC: This painting is called Lucio, and it's for Lucio Fontana. One of the things that Marx talks about is the structures that impose themselves as obligatory and sort of refusing to adhere to them. And the first is the refusal of gender, the neutral is the neuter, he said. It is also a refusal of the rest of the oppositions that align themselves with the paradigm of gender, continually active / passive, subject / object.

You know, I think, even though it was a long time ago, when I went to school, people would say, oh, American painting is like painting that comes out and meets the viewer, and Asian painting is like the viewer has to go meet it. And there's something, I think… always there's that kernel of truth, but it's also there's something really, you lock into a position too much when you think that way.

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And these are, I'm going to show you a few drawings that I showed in Berlin, and what Marx says is that the neutral is kind of about, like it's anti-violent, it's about promoting peace.

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Let's see. Some of you are old enough to recall reading—I don't know if people still read it, but—Clement Greenberg, where everything, every argument is—or Hegel, you know, which is like where Greenberg got a lot of his ways of positioning things—is that there's always a kind of conflictual situation going on.

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So this is a repeat of another painting, and it's just, it's bigger, it's a little shinier, but I was kind of trying for the same thing, and I did this maybe a year after the other.

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So in 2008, I did an exhibition in New York that I called Come in a Little Closer at Michael Steinberg Fine Arts, and it was a really important show for me.

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CC: …and I did a lot of work in New York, and this is the largest painting from that show. What time is it? Is it okay if we end like around six? I mean, people have to go to [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. I've always said that any talk that's more than three, five, or fifteen minutes is an aggressive act. So please don't, I don't want you to feel that way.

CC: So that show, it was 2008, was really important for me, because I left the gallery I'd been with for a long time, and did this show at a place I knew was interim, because I wanted to show the paintings, I wanted to show how my work was and what I thought,

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CC: …and the large paintings of this show, like these, were very different from the small ones. They were really expansive.

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WOMAN: What's the scale?

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CC: Um, this one's about 85 by 75, and this one's about 80 by 105. This one's about 60-, 80-, 70-something by 60-something, about. Oh wait, I have the dimensions. This one is 71 by 69.

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CC: And then the small paintings were dense and difficult, and kind of gnarly, and you know, it was a fun show to make.

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CC: This one is 25 by 29.

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CC: That’s one of those with the pours and cracks and things.

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CC: And this is called Nomad, it was in the show, and it's not really related to any of those, and in my recent practice, the last four years or so, I've often done a Nomad painting every year or so, and it's kind of… they’re named in honor of Prouvé, who did design furniture, and he had this whole set of works that were for nomadic living that were furniture.

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CC: And this is like a subsequent dense, difficult one.

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CC: That’s the Nomad that came after. They usually have veneer in them, and they usually have kind of, like, deco. I think they have a little bit of deco quality.

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CC: And this one's called Little Nomad. It's very small. It's 10 by 13.

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CC: And right after that, I just kind of relaxed and painted some paintings that I don't think are very interesting, that weren't that ambitious. I'm not showing them. And then these are, if I, you know, if I had students here, I would show them, because it's fun to do that. But, so then, um, so then these are ones when I decided, like, to stop being so relaxed and get more ambitious.

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CC: You know, I like, I need to work and I like to paint, so even if I'm tired, I try to make something. And this was a hard painting for me to make. And now I'm working really from this kind of way of thinking with the painting, like very simple, very basic, very reduced.

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CC: This is called Outside Painting because I did it outside. I did this painting at the Albee Foundation.

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CC: And this is a small painting, 18 by 16 of that same period, this is 2010, called Writing Assets. So I can do this. We can stop, or I can show some more recent work. You know, I don't know what you want to do.

WOMAN: Keep going.

CC: Well, you're late.

MAN: Please continue.

CC: Maybe, you know, just don't feel... These are actually some of... I'll show some more and then, you know, we'll talk about this.

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CC: The works that I'm going to show are related to Linear B, my way of thinking about Linear B and its decipherment. And some are done on paper--these are my paintings--I don't use Linear B, I'll just say a few sentences about--some are on paper and some are on linen with water-based paints and raw pigment. And at times, oil. And often, there are the... This is like the...

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CC: In Linear B, there were like pictograms, logograms, and syllabary. And, you know, there's Linear A also, which has not been translated. What's fun about Linear B—it’s a script--but it also, it had people working on it who didn't know how to translate it. And when they didn't know how, instead of saying they didn't know how, they made up things. So it really led to... These were like archaeologists. So it thwarted the whole process of any kind of decipherment. But it is thought to be ... And it was eventually deciphered by an amateur, an architect and amateur archaeologist who was named Michael Ventris. And he had been aware of it since he was 14. And, you know, you can read about it. But what I'm interested in... I'm interested in it. I don't, you know... Just because it's interesting. But the paintings that I have been...

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CC: The paintings I've been working on develop through a kind of an act and the displacement of the act. And also, the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] are really important. And the way that they group is arrived at through a kind of contradiction and regrouping. They're not... They're very unpreplanned. But I can't say they're spontaneous either.

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CC: And the first one I showed in this... these are on paper…

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CC: And they're done with... Well, they're gesso, they're pigment, they're water-based paint of various kinds.

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CC: And I didn’t... Part of the connectedness I have to the Linear B-thing is that it was really hard to read some of the script in tablets because of the erosion and everything else, besides that it was sort of thwarted by fake translations. And I've always been looking for, in painting, a way of eliminating things. Like, not just putting things on, but getting rid of them.

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CC: And this is one of these, but on linen. And this is 59 by 61. And I'm also working a lot with surface.

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CC: And this one is 30 by 36. And I built up the surface and then worked over it. But I built it up, like, mechanically. I haven't built it up intrinsically. So that when I work on it, I can sort of eradicate things.

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WOMAN: Would you ever [GARBLED: think to do this thing intrinsically rather than mechanically?]

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CC: Well, the convention in painting, I believe, is that the residue of what you intended that didn't work out—you know, the thing that you try to get rid of, especially in classical oil painting--is a kind of… forms part of the quality of the painting in the end. Even whatever it was, whether it was, you tried to paint an apple and it looked more like a pear, so you tried to get rid of it. And then over it, you painted an airplane. Well, the idea being that whatever you had there is informing the airplane. And that's just a kind of classic idea of painting, of how… an old-timey world. And I think part of that comes from reality. The reality that it's really almost impossible to eradicate something that you had painted. So that often you get a surface that's been made because you made mistakes, or made things that you then decided to do [GARBLED: that long?] for five years on one canvas. Then it has a kind of residue.

CC: So that's what I meant “intrinsically.” But you're still connected to that one canvas. Well, I'm kind of interested in seeing how I can make a surface have the kind of resonance without having all the residue of the past. And that's what I meant by mechanically. But that was like, I wanted you to ask this question. It's my shorthand way of thinking about it. And I think that's about it. So if anyone has any questions.

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MAN: I was just curious, do you ever show your photographs to your students, or are they part of something?

CC: No, nothing I make is too separate. The only place… people learn… I don't really deal with. When people see my work, I can't show them everything when they come to the studio. So often in America, many people wouldn't know I made the Altered X-Rays. So with the photographs, I show them… there's a place that no longer exists that was an alternative space where I showed everything. I showed everything. And it was very small, but I could show everything. And I was just doing that for fun. But I like to do that. That's what I would really like to do. But since I show in order to have some money, and somebody is running a gallery, I don't say, “Oh, if you like the paintings, maybe you should look at the photographs,” because they're kind of available to look at, because of the internet. So it hasn't happened in a (meaner?) sense.

WOMAN: So I guess the thing I'm trying to understand, I feel like the way that you speak about the paintings, in terms of time, makes it… [GARBLED: If you understand how they’re made?]. Well, like you were talking earlier about the one that seemed like almost a little green ball with a yellow border. You were talking about the fabric. And you said there would be one of those that might be able to, again, to sense the kind of linearity. Which then leads me to think that there's maybe one or two paintings going on at a time. And then there's a kind of, it's almost like you have to remember something you learned in the previous painting and then maybe reapply it. Rather than a kind of studio ecosystem where you glance across the room and see something and then pull that back with [GARBLED]. You're getting this kind of complexity or this kind of hybridity of languages due to these different arms of the practice. But it seems like they're more turning over through memory rather than through contiguity. Like they're all being made at the same time. Does that make sense?

CC: Yeah.

WOMAN: But I'm not sure which one it is. How many paintings might be going on at one time?

CC: It depends. Like when I was in Germany, I had a very long table. But I had all one kind of paintings going on on that table. And in New York, in my studio, I can have maybe one, I have kind of the Nomadic thing going and I have the Linear B thing going. You know, this is shorthand. And then I have the paintings on paper going that are kind of the Linear B ones. But they're slightly different because they're on paper. So I can't really have that much work going on in the same visual field. I mean, like when I was working a lot on the Altered X-Rays, I had paintings out that I could kind of like connect with. But I wasn't working on those paintings. I was working just on the Altered X-Rays. Now, the Altered X-Rays are something that I can work on and work on paintings. But it can't work on all the kinds of things I do at once. So it is, a lot of it is actually--I don't think conceptual is the right word--but what I feel like thinking about. You know, what I feel like thinking about. Or what I've agreed to do. Like I agreed to do the show of the Altered X, or I thought the Altered X-Rays would be a good show for that space. Or I'm going to do a show of the paintings. Like I have a whole other body of work that I haven't shown here. Like they start with a print technique and then I paint over them. So I'm going to do that show in Houston. So if I have to finish a show or do some things, then I just concentrate on that. And I can't do as much as I’d like to. You know, it's many kinds of things. I mean, I have a pretty okay studio, but I don't know if I could, if I had more space, I don't know if I could manage it. I'd have to have more time. But I have a lot of time, so I don't know.

CC: You know, I'd like to have it be all described as working from it, sort of more experientially than the whole, excuse the expression. But, you know, and working on it all at the same time. But I don't know that I have the mentality or the time for it or the space for it. It's everything. You know, I had one thing of those very strongly that maybe I could experiment and see. Like if I had double the studio that I have, maybe I could see--or double the time, which isn't physically possible, or double the mentality that I have, you know, that I could experiment and see.

MAN: [UNINTELLIGIBLE QUESTION ABOUT LINEAR B] What connected you to Linear B?

CC: You know, I've always, ever since I knew about it, which is like a million years ago, I have been fascinated. It's partly the idea, like partly the idea of all this stuff being, like sort of… You know, these people actually made these words up. Like they looked at a pictogram and they said, “Oh, this means…” you know, the equivalent of saying “This means car,” only it meant “cow.” You know, it was that extreme, that they sort of made these ideas up. And then the fact that it was, like what it looks like, and the fact that it was finally discovered by an amateur. It's, you know, the whole nine yards.

WOMAN: How are you using the word “nomad?” In relation to what?

CC: How do you mean?

WOMAN: What is, why are you using the word “nomad?” What does that mean?

CC: You mean besides what I, besides like the relationship of them to Prouvé, and yeah, there is another reason. One is the relationship of like that kind of, um, fake veneer. It's not fake, it's actually wood, but putting, cutting it out and making it sort of “moderne,” like we did with this stuff. But it was, it's also, there was one point where I was moving, I had many, I was moving from studio to studio, so the idea of a nomadic existence was interesting. I mean, I wasn't a nomad, but my studio was like, after having the same studio for like 30 years, I had like four studios in two years or something, like radical, like that. So I felt a little like nomadic. So it's both.

MAN: You know, I'm just wondering because we work in different locations, like, um, you know, we have a [GARBLED: dormouse?] relationship as you would say, but how about outside, if you are in, um, [dorms?] by chance, do you know what these [dorms?] are like?

CC: Um, well, I don't work in Houston. Yeah, I'm much more relaxed in Europe. You know, I'm much more relaxed in Europe. You know, especially when I’m at, that you know, the [GARBLED] conference place, I just, you know, it's just, I think riding the bike, and even in Cologne, the rain, and the Rhine, and all of that stuff, it makes you kind of involved in a kind of more melodic way of being. And I think that's important to work to understand. Um, the same with the Albee Foundation. I mean, that's, like, you're in this isolated place that has spiders, and near the ocean, and you kind of get into another, and that's, you know, it doesn't feel like you're involved in contemporary culture in New York, you know, except you can watch a video, a DVD. I mean, so, it's, I think it's, it's very different in New York.

Okay, thank you.