SJ: Could you talk about your work, and your interest in your "nomads"?
CC: I do many kinds of work – what I call “curtain” and “drawing” paintings, “nomads,” and “altered x rays” – works on exposed x ray film and not painting per se.
The curtain and drawing paintings are done with pigment and water-based paint. They begin with the act of seeing, before logic and rationality take over. The uncertainties I experience when seeing and painting filter into them. They are informed by not knowing, and being unsure of an experience.
I began my Nomad paintings in response to the profoundly unsettling experience of having no permanent home or studio. (In 2007, I was suddenly forced to leave my loft of over thirty years when a vacate order was issued by the Department of Buildings of the City of New York.) The Nomads were my attempt to place myself in a world in which I had lost my place.
They are also a tribute to Jean Prouvé.* The first time I saw Prouvé’s work and attempted to follow a form within it, I found that an unexpected curve or move would force me to discard my initial expectation of what the form had first signaled. Forms detoured from the expectations they set – often the case in interesting painting but uncommon in three-dimensional work. I learned about Prouvé’s ideas and felt a kinship.
After the vacate order, I worked as much as possible, probably even more than I had in “normal” life, in many modes, and in a variety of studios. In the borrowed studio of a friend, I began cutting some wood veneer that was on hand, attempting to follow Prouvé’s shapes and forms. As forms detoured from the expectations they set, the slippages and discrepancies that occurred encouraged me toward including more disparate elements in the rest of the painting. After gluing the cut shapes onto stretched linen, I deployed both oil and water-base paint to make marks and forms that were antithetical to the cut shapes, and I painted over other parts of the cut shapes in an attempt to incorporate them into a larger whole.
Jean Prouvé, 8 April 1901 - 23 March 1984, the architect and designer who made and produced structures and furniture for nomadic existence. Prouvé had been a member of the French resistance, sought to foster connections between art and industry, and made efforts to link art and social consciousness.
Lately I’ve been drawing onto the veneer with ink, cutting it, then attaching it to the canvas.
SJ: Where do the altered x rays, nomads, and large paintings that play with vision crossover? Do they? Or are they separate bodies of work?
CC: They do crossover, and they are separate. Perhaps as a child of the sixties, I like a lot of freedom, and that includes freedom in my studio. Everything works best when I begin with the sense that everything is possible and choose the sort of work I want to make in a particular time period, say within a given day, week, or month.
The curtain and drawing paintings require certain specific painting processes. My altered x rays and nomads rely more on making than painting.
The altered x rays began as elegies to those who had passed, specifically those who had died of AIDS. Eventually they came to include a broader segment of those with disease and debilitation. Burning, cutting, cutting away, reclaiming, and repositioning are some of the ways these works come into being. They, and the nomads are a window onto the world outside of the studio, and they enable that world to enter my other work. In the “nomads” I reach for the elegance of Prouvé yet in cutting and trying to follow a form, I experience the impossibility of dong so.
SJ: I like that seeing comes before logic and operates as a source of uncertainty. How does logic get in the way when you are painting?
CC: Logic doesn't get in the way exactly. I don’t let it. By that I mean, when we see we tend, almost automatically, to organize our impressions into rational, acceptable forms, according to models that were made before us. I attempt to work from that experience of first seeing, when things are disjointed. My results are often as disjointed and disparate as my first impressions.
I think in a similar mode
SJ: This reminds me a bit of the Art Informel movement (too obvious?), and its intuitive unplanned approach. Do you feel a connection to the thinking of this movement?
CC: That is an excellent question because I am not sure of the answer. It’s a sort of “yes” and “no” – first of all, I am always skeptical about movements in relation to artists. Artists tend to move in and out of them. In addition, I feel I don't know what constitutes art informel other than certain historic and stylistic affinities, or what the informel artists thought. However, I see the approach of most of the artists considered art informel neither particularly intuitive nor unplanned but rather strategic. I do feel a connectedness to the attitude of some designated as art informel artists. I support the non-hierarchal and connect with the “horizontality” of much of the art, and the physicality of the methods deployed in its making. Art informel is a lot of different kinds of art and its materiality is a feature that I am links me to it. Fautrier’s paintings are built physically. They consist of paper, materials, and relief conjoined with color, then painted over. I don’t understand his approach, yet I know his motivations in making the physical work he made in the time he made them were complicated.
There was an interesting exhibition done by Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss at the Pompidou Centre in the late nineties, 1996 I believe, that utilized some of Bataille’s thoughts, particularly base materialism, to destabilize existing foundations. The exhibition, and the accompanying text, Formless: A User's Guide (1997), attempted to disrupt binary conceits about 20th century art, for example, the split between form and content. Robert Morris felt pieces were in the show, so were works of Fautrier and Fontana.
SJ: What are your thoughts on formalism?
CC: I cannot define formalism on any deep art critical level yet I do know it assumes various guises – i.e.Wölfflin, Fry, Greenberg, and has appeared at various times. At Bennington College, where I was a student in the sixties, and later in the early seventies, Clement Greenberg asserted the primacy of a particular aesthetic. He did this through a formalist analysis that seemed to me at the time based on Wöfflin. Greenberg’s formalism became, in the minds of many, linked to the style of the work he supported, to his authoritarianism (i.e. “There’s no accounting for good taste” and as subtext, “I am the one with the taste” and his hierarchical approach to art history. I can go into this further but really it is complicated in a way that’s not about ideas.
SJ: Could you? With more of an emphasis on the hierarchy created?
CC: Greenberg’s formalism tended to deracinate the work produced – for the artist and the viewer alike. The work of art was to be considered outside of the psychological, social, and economic context in which it had been made or shown. The binary approach, for example, painterly vs. linear, was restrictive. This left room for an aggressive assertion of a favored look and style.
SJ: Lets go back to the issue of the formlessness. How do you address the issues of form and formlessness in your work?
CC: Formlessness approached as a visual issue can be uninteresting but as a notion it has boundless possibilities that gave me ideas about painting, particularly formlessness in the psychoanalytic context considered by Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois. About twenty years ago I assigned myself the task of attempting a painting that was as formless as possible yet would still be interesting to look at. It was very difficult but in the end I arrived at two paintings. They were medium sized and a little strange in color and had some odd types of form and lots of line and that's what stood out about them.
SJ: Do you think there is a hierarchy in contemporary painting?
CC: There must be in that hierarchies occur, but I think in our moment they change more frequently.
An insidious aspect of formalism is that it removes any sense of the world from the practice of painting. For the artist and the viewer alike, the painting is considered an autonomous object, outside of society. The altered x rays and the Nomads refute that. Obliquely and explicitly they assert the existence of the world at large, and somehow enable that world to enter my other works.