2010_MICA
Thank you for the very nice introduction and thank you so much for offering me the opportunity to talk about my work here at MICA, a place that provides a community to many artists, and whose history has personal and professional meaning for me. It is quite an honor. And thank you all for coming.
I’m going to read a little background and then show images.
I grew up in New York in a family that valued art and culture. My idea of modern art -- as it was called then -- was abstract. Bracque, Picasso, Miro, Mondrian and I. Rice Pereira -- were some of the artists I looked at as a child along with the American modernists -- Hartley, Dove, Ryder. And Sheeler. I did not know of Blakelock.
I thought of art as something available, familiar, almost homey, malleable. In other words, it could become political like Kollwitz, knarly like Beckman or Georges Roualt, aestheticised like Vuillard -- all of whom I was introduced to in high school in NY, along with contemporary art.
I attended a small elitist liberal arts college in Vermont -- Bennington College -- that was sexist and homophobic as most places were in that era. The prevailing aesthetic was soft hard edge and color field in painting (Paul Feeley), the prevailing view in criticism was formalism (Greenberg) although there were alternative critical voices -- Lawrence Alloway and Eugene Goossen, and I connected with those. I got the impression there could be such a thing as a world view from Tony Smith. Welded steel both expressive and formal prevailed in sculpture in the work of David Smith and Tony Caro.
The resolutely American New England-ness of the region and the introduction of industrial materials and methods with which to make art helped reorganize my ideas of art and my production. In graduate school, I became friends with one of my undergraduate drawing students. Liz Phillips opened up a world of contemporary sound with which I connected -- Pauline Olivieros, Steve Reich -- and with a world that subverted modernist visual forms and changed the way I thought about visual art -- Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, and Fluxus.
After school, I tried to learn about art and architecture of the past. I traveled when I could.
Spanish painting spoke to me more than any other. I was drawn to Velasquez for his opulence -- of paint handling, and of representation.
I was intrigued by the conflicting sightings of reality represented within the same painting.
I was drawn to Goya for making visible a darker side of life and I loved his gnarly subject matter.
Naturalistic form, melodic space, clunky shapes that become volumetic have always attracted me, too. As does a freedom in nature and with materials. Always, I wanted an accessible art and for art to be part of life.
Fontana
Minoan pot
Malevich
Beuys (gold bronze on paper)
Masson
Angers
Looking at architecture became a way of thinking through notions of space and form and society via various periods of the history.
Nurnberg parade grounds
I became interested in the viewer as participant – in the viewer in the performative role.
Paestrum
The Acropolis, Paestrum (second Temple of Hera - It is also possible that the temple was originally dedicated to both Hera and Zeus; some offertory statues found around the larger altar are thought to demonstrate this identification.)and various other Greek structures seemed to position a person in relation to the cosmos.
Architecture as residue of cultural process, added to and changed over time as cultures change, such as the Alhambra and the Mosque at Cordoba reinforced my inclination to make paintings that develop over long periods of time, informed by a broad range of experience. I thought: if a painting has aspects of a broad and long range of lived experience, it would have the possibility of greater resonance.
Sacagewa
I made art and showed it but it wasn’t until 1984 with a solo show at Max Hutchinson Gallery that my work began to receive attention. All the paintings in the show were dense oil paintings such as this one, about 77 x 77. I began these paintings during my first Visiting Artist job at the SAIC. It was there I felt my NY School roots and there I understood how important painting was to me -- not just art but painting. I taught myself how to use brushes and oil paint to make the paintings I wanted to make.
Molloy at Tournus, 96 x 100
In the mid-eighties I traveled to France where I looked at Romanesque art and architecture, and hung out with the painter Joan Mitchell. It was important for me to know someone from that era who was a committed painter, a woman, and a pro. I loved the Romanesque -- how forms mutated into other forms. Nothing seemed stable yet the structure was immutable. I began to use the pour as a scaffolding on which to hang my brush work.
Outside St Severin, 60 x 50
Wolff Gallery installation
Domination of Black, 33 x 29” 1991
I have always been interested in the natural and in what I thought of as the phenomenological, and valued the process of painting. In the early nineties, I began attempting paintings that relied more fully on pours and chemical changes. At times, opulent paintings resulted although opulence was nothing I consciously sought. I did want to affirm that painting could be connected to the urban world around me which seemed plastic and bright.
Through the Oaks, 83 x 95” 1994
I had also begun working with materials that were outside of the standard studio system for certain effects and to refer to the energies and entropies of the earth. I made this painting with the intent to have it carry well from a distance.
Canal St, NY subway slides
At around this time I began to record my observations of natural phenomena, and I sought out the formless in the art of others. My photographs began to function as observational records of life, like sketchbooks. Formlessness or anti-form interests me conceptually and presents a challenge to me as a visual artist. It is often visible on and under the streets of New York.
Snow
Dimensions and materials 4” x 6”
Snow is actual snow that accumulated, got dirty, melted, froze, got rained on, melted again and refroze. The subject of this photograph is probably unrecognizable as such yet it is not uninteresting. There is a sense of something having evolved or morphed in a manner that was neither controlled nor intentional, ugly and beautiful at one and the same time.
Fautrier
From around 1995 - 1997 I lived in Cologne where it was easy for me to see a lot of Fautrier, Klein, Wols, Fontana. I also looked at contemporary German painting -- more casual in approach and slacker-ish than American painting.
Like many Americans abroad I gravitated toward other Americans. This sculpture by
Dan Asher
an American living in Köln at the time, made with forms he makes breaks and then puts back together
Garbage on the river
Ugly in what it connotes, yet beautiful as a visual field.
Figure – Prangenberg
The Mob Within the Heart, 59 x 63” 1996
I made this painting in my Köln studio. Informed by my experience with German art, my handling became more casual and looser yet more stacato.
I used some of my altered x rays (which I’ll show you in a bit) to print onto the paintings.
While the maker of the thing, the artist is also usually the first viewer as well, and while working in Köln I felt myself taking the role as first viewer more seriously, while of course remaining maker. The paintings became less composed. I found that disconcerting but it seemed vital. The nice thing about the German art situation is that people become involved with an artist’s notions, not merely their product. People write about and buy work that they didn’t understand or even like for the purpose of knowing about it more.
Installation View of The Mob Within the Heart, 1997
I used the title of the painting for the title of the exhibition because it included so many diverse elements:
altered x rays
drawings
three dimensional drawings
drawings that contract or expand according to whim
paintings
Intermission?
Won From the Heath, 79 x 82 was one of the first paintings I made when I returned to my NY studio from Germany. It is done on a house painter’s drop cloth. I was just so happy to be back in the States again in the land of cheap -- relatively speaking -- art materials. I thought of this painting as attempting to break free of confines. Although I loved many things about Germany, particularly Cologne where I lived, it is culturally more rules-bound, the society is more hierarchical.
Terrains Vagues, 1991-97
I am interested in making (and seeing) art that offers psychic space to roam around and even get lost in. Perhaps that can happen when space of the painting is uncharted. Then time can be wasted, or at least has no purpose.
from David Ebony - ArtNet
“ The largest painting on view, the approximately 9-by-7-foot Terrains Vagues, which the artist worked on for six years, presents gray ground covered with countless incidents of contention, all of which are somehow defused.
Sphinx, 25x19, 1997
One of the most intriguing works, Sphinx, features a richly textured dark brown background and a prominent yellow shape that looks like a fist grasping a sawed-off club. Here, a conflict erupts between figuration and abstraction, but, once again, the artist does not take sides.”
I do believe one can have two opposing forces or several contradictory ways of thinking within the same painting, and it was validating to have this acknowledged by someone who did not know me or my project.
Theory as an Object, 1999
how could a painting retain interest with a form that seemed without interest -- this painting was experimental. I was trying to make something I had not seen before in painting and to see if it was possible to make something formless without its being boring.
Shadows of noisy things, 1999
I was thinking about the differences between painting and drawing, trying to make a painting that relied on unpretty linear elements -- perhaps writing or scribbling, not drawing.
Drawing #22-02, 20 x 30
The following works were made during a period when I lived inside as much as possible. Perhaps as a consequence, I became involved with the possibilities of interior space. I attempted to make works that provided an open vista. This painting allowed my sense of interiority, and the world, to remain vast.
Reflection of Space, 1, 2002 26” x 23”
charcoal, graphite, marble dust, matte medium, oil, oil mediums on muslin
Reflection Of Space 2, 2002
36 x 38” (91.44 x 96.52 cm)
Charcoal, graphite, matte medium on muslin
Reflection Of Space 3, 2002
36 x 38” (91.44 x 96.52 cm)
Charcoal, graphite, matte medium on muslin
I am interested in art that does not cover over the underside of life.
Francis Bacon is a big hero of mine,
Francis Bacon, George Dyer
Between the Museum and the School
homelessness between 2 rich institutions
Mozartstraße
The reverence for art and beauty is so strong that streets are named after classical composers. Yet racial and ethnic prejudice is endemic. Mozartstraße represents these contradictory elements. say what the marker says Living in Germany, I came to feel that the memorialization of the war period of German history diverted attention away from the underlying causes of the Holocaust and away from the daily racism of the current society.
[The historical marker reads “In Memory of the Dead and a Warning to the Living, On This Site Was the Regional Headquarters of NSDAP in the ‘Braune Haus’ Where the SA and the SS Tortured Their Victims.” ]
I am also interested in an art in which presence refers to absence.
Brussels, my photo
Rachel Whiteread shelf pieces
Joanne Greenbaum 80x80
Andreas Gursky, Karlsruhe
Tony Smith, Die
R72, 1999
My altered x-ray series consists of X-ray and MRI films of strangers, friends, and colleagues that I have responded to with paint and chemical and physical interventions. They serve as elegies of those passed, and act as reminders of our own vulnerability and mortality.
Leipzig installation of altered x rays
Köln installation of altered x rays
Seeing ones own work installed is clarifying. The artist’s role as viewer expands when the work is outside of the studio. Seeing these installations enabled me to focus the conflict between abstraction and figuration, and seek that in my paintings.
Portrait, 19x19
Parts of the World, the Pleasure of Text, 60x65
Sweatshop dumpster, NY
The brightly colored scraps overflowing from a gross dumpster had a surprising and unruly beauty.
Their liveliness contrasts with their identity as remnants from one of the many sweat shops that employ illegal immigrants in New York City. As an instance of the fundamental discord between visual pleasure and moral conscience, Sweatshop Dumpster represents some of the contradictions and conflicts of life as experienced in the 21st century. The photograph gave me the courage and conviction to transgress formal rules and conventions in my painting.
[In 2002 after going back and forth between New York and the South for five years, and living in Europe before that, I began to be in NY pretty much non-stop.]
show painting but do not say title
12” x 19” acrylic, charcoal, copper, oil pastel, pastel on muslin
When I first began to go back and forth between New York and Greensboro, NC where I was teaching, everyone in NY said, isn’t it beautiful there? But I was disconcerted by so little visual art. And my associations of violence and white racism overpowered my pleasure in nature. Looking at the majestic trees and lush beauty I imagined past lynchings. This traumatic underside filtered into my work, along with the lushness. I made this painting in NY and it’s called Strange Fruit 2004
It was pointed out to me by Barry Schwabsky in relation to my 2004 show that more time you spend with the paintings, that is, the more chance you give a painting to be a space, not just a surface, the less significant the imagistic elements seem, and the more involving is the experience of viewing the painting.
the following paintings were among those in that 2004 exhibition
Things Belong to Her and She Belongs to Other Things
46 x 48” acrylic, charcoal, copper, oil, oil pastel, pastel, pigment on muslin
I developed this painting over many years. It was the first in which I consciously eradicated opulent, seemingly natural, skeins and pours of paint by scribbling over them with charcoal and pastel, then messily erasing and blurring some of that scribbling. This method derived from my view that nothing is purely natural nor unmitigatedly beautiful, nor ever still or final or closed; there is never one place, nor is there one way of being. This is a method I deployed with The Periphery, too in which I used the charcoal as a tool to move paint to cut any sense of ease of handling. I had a sense during this period that existence in this century is difficult and hard won. My handling of materials and process and space have been the means by which I have attempted to make content available. The deliberate marks travel from the boarder to the center. My process would suggest the potential for borders and margins to become central, paralleling migratory aspects of life in the 21st century.
The Rhein
The ring configuration of the streets, the Rhein, and the devastation of World War II determine the physical and psychological parameters of daily life in Köln. The form of the ring is palpable when traveling by bicycle. One’s entire body feels the curve that seems never ending.
My sense of freedom there derives from the physicality of life in a place that is urban yet down-to-earth, the human-scale architecture, and the respect for visual art as a necessary component of daily life.
three water drawings -- being on water
trying to draw the motion of the water while one is feeling it and seeing it simultaneously.
03-04
11-05
04-06
Suspended
Moon Over Montana 34 x 58
are probably the closest in spirit and idea to my current work. In them I attempt to make space vast and deep. I do this physically, without much reliance on illusionism.
R 181 Double
Permeability 29 x 26”
In my present work the phenomenological and its less sensual aspect -- the formless -- co-exist with the marks and color that are seemingly and resolutely intended. Mostly, I am interested in making the issues I have worked with all along more extreme. In subverting figure/ground relations, I attempt to make a definable structure increasing instabile, to make the imagistic elements less important in favor of a virtual space.
In Contingency and Permeability, 71 x 69” the cracks of the raised surfaces operate as drawing yet at times revert to their literal physical nature. They are embued with color but the color spills out of them and becomes the ground. I am aiming for a deep virtual space with contradictory ordering.
Counter-discourse, 28 x 25
Here the figure and ground shift and reform continually. Absence and presence change places.
These drawings were shown in Berlin in 2007, along with Writing Nature and Who Knows, 2007 102 x 105” (259.1 x 266.7 cm), acrylic mediums, pastel, pigment on portrait linen.
The Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series -- a group of playful events on synthetic paper were shown at an experimental space Abaton Garage in New Jersey, also in 2007, and some will be shown in Weisbaden in 2011.
My work continues to develop and expand in response to the ongoing complexities and contestation of contemporary culture, iterating themes I developed over the preceding ten year period.
Orange Spray, 2007
22 x 20” (55.8 x 50.8 cm),
acrylic, collaged paper, spray paint on linen
Space Has No Shape, 2007
38 x 48” (96.5 x 121.9 cm)
acrylic medium, Flashe, pigment on portrait linen
Pinkish One, 2007
32 x 52” (81.28 x 132.08 cm)
acrylic, chalk pastel, gel medium, graphite, pencil, pigment, oil pastel on linen.
Paintings from my 2008 exhibition, Come in a Little Closer, at Michael Steinberg Fine Art follow.
This was an important exhibition for me. I had left the gallery I’d been with for many years and chosen a less established interim place in which to show what I felt evidenced my way of thinking, and that was my most interesting. My small paintings were dense, concentrated and gnarly; the large ones expansive. The exhibition was taken seriously in the painting world of New York, many saw it more than once. It was written about seriously by several respected writers of contemporary art, including Joan Waltemath. All that meant a lot to me. Joan criticised my first Nomad painting, and she was right -- you can all simplify your lives considerably by paying close attention to her words.
Lucio, 2008
78 x 68” (198.12 x 172.72 cm)
acrylic, pigment, studio debris on linen
Curtain, 2008
75 x 103” (190.5 x 261.62 cm)
acrylic, Flashe on linen
Brown Object, 2008
26 x 34” (66.04 x 86.36 cm)
acrylic mediums, oil on linen
Turquoise Suppression, 2008
25 x 29” (63.5 x 73.66 cm)
oil on linen
Rainbow Pour, 2008
22 x 38” (55.88 x 96.52 cm)
acrylic, Flashe on linen
The Same Blank Place, 2008
77 x 84 (195.58 x 213.36)
oil on linen
The Grass Turned Grey, 2008
71 x 69” (180.34 x 175.26)
oil on linen
Nomad, 2008
38 x 34” (96.52 x 86.36)
acrylic, enamel spray, Flashe, wood veneer on linen *
White Object, 2008
32 x 34” (81.28 x 86.36 cm)
acrylic mediums, oil on linen
Nomad 2, 2009
38 x 34 in. (96.52 x 86.36 cm), acrylic, Flashe, spray enamel, tape and wood veneer on linen
Little Nomad, 2009
10 x 13” (25.4 x 33 cm)
pigment, spray paint, wood veneer on linen
The Brush Paintings
Brush 5, 2009
14 x 11” (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
oil on linen
Brush 6, 2009
19 x 14” (48.3 x 35.6 cm)
oil on linen
Brush 3, 2009
27 x 26” (68.6 x 66 cm)
oil on linen
Inform, 2009
13 x 21” (33 x 53.3)
oil, pigment on linen
Drawing, 2009
26 x 28” (66 x 71 cm)
acrylic, Flashe on linen
Outside Painting, 2009
69 x 85” (175.3 x 215.9 cm)
acrylic, Flashe, gesso, latex on linen
Writing Absence, 2010
18x16
LINEAR B
In 1939, a large number of clay tablets inscribed with Linear B writing were found at Pylos on the Greek mainland, much to the surprise of Evans, who thought Linear B was confined to Crete.
Evans spent the rest of his life trying to decipher Linear B. He realised that three different writing systems were used in ancient Crete: a 'hieroglyphic' script, Linear A, and Linear B. The hieroglphic script appears only on seal stones and has yet to be deciphered. Linear A, also undeciphered, is thought to have evolved from the hieroglyphic script and was used until the 15th Century BC. After the Greeks conquered Knossos, Linear B developed, probably from Linear A, although the relationship between the two scripts is unclear.
Linear B had syllabary and logograms, and some pictograms
02-10, 22 x 29-3/4“ (55.88 x 75.56cm)
pastel, pencil, pigment, watercolor on paper
12-10, 22 x 29-1/2“ (55.88 x 74.9cm)
pigment, watercolor on paper
Cora Cohen, 03-10, 22 x 29-3/4“ (55.88 x 75.56cm)
pastel, gesso, pencil, watercolor on paper
Cora Cohen, 01-10, 22 x 29-3/4“ (55.88 x 75.56cm)
Cora Cohen, 04-10, 22 x 29-3/4“ (55.88 x 75.56cm)
pigment, pastel, gesso, watercolor on paper
Cora Cohen, 06-10, 22 x 29-3/4“ (55.88 x 75.56cm)
pencil, pigment, ink, watercolor on paper
22-10 - LAST
I remain convinced of painting’s resilience as a medium with which to express some of the most profound, complex and elusive aspects of lived experience in our century.